[-empyre-] Art, Intuition and Technology

[Jennifer Fisher]

Hi All,

I am particularly interested in understanding clairsentience as a form of paranormal touch that involves the perception of energies residing in objects. William Denton’s 1863 The Soul of Things: Psychometric Experiments for Re-Living History, is a foundational text on Spiritualist psychometry and its value to art history. He defined psychometry as the ability to read reputedly magnetic, energetic or “ethereal” signatures of things. Denton theorized that psychometry could convey emotions that radiate from objects. Initially skeptical, his wife, Elizabeth Denton, eventually became a renowned psychometric medium. She would hold objects to her forehead and describe how impressions came to her like a panorama “with the velocity of lightning,” so fast that the contours of objects were imperceptible, while at other times things appeared still and fixed. The clairsentient inflections of her “sense of position” during readings presciently conjures the medium of film. While reading, scenes might unfurl in chronological order, or there might be moments of transition, abrupt shifts in scenes, slowed-down or sped-up perception and varieties of perspectives (from above, distanced, close up) that recall what Gilles Deleuze (1989) has theorized as the “time image,” a series of juxtaposed “presents” that mutually influence each other. In this way, the time image defies set chronological structures and purely intellectual activity to open perception to involve a complex telescoping of temporalities of both the liminal and the present.

Over a hundred years later, psychometry as paranormal touch offers an intriguing technology of intuition for reconstituting the affective knowledges resonant in artifacts. Where Art History employs forensic methods to study artifacts of the past, it is my contention that psychometry can expand upon that which can be known through objects as part of an expanded art historical epistemology and methodology. DisplayCult’s Psychometry and the Affective Artifact project involves employing psychics (some of whom have worked with missing person investigations) to recover lost history of unattributed artifacts in museum collections. Professional mediums are invited to read through the portrait or object to determine aspects of the affective contexts of unknown artists: their mood, surroundings, climate, social station, emotional relationships, challenges and talents. I’ll post more on the project this week.

Warmly,

Jennifer

Jennifer Fisher
Professor Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies
Department of Visual Art and Art History CFA 252
York University 4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario  M3J 1P3
jefish at yorku.ca

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