[-empyre-] Touched

[Ruth Skinner]

Hello and thanks for the prompt, Jennifer.

A real pleasure to read words from all.

The clairvoyant I'm working with used her personal take on a version of
playing card cartomancy popularized in England the late 19th/early 20th
centuries. There would have been many advertisements for these playing card
readers in the papers around that time, and there were popular booklets and
pamphlets on card reading. Playing card cartomancy was also vectored onto
some beautiful and intimate objects. Thinking of the emphasis of touch
referenced by Jennifer, Erika, and Ann Cvetkovich, fortune telling tea cups
were pretty popular around this time: they were designed with prompts from
playing card cartomancy in the early 20th century. These lovely objects
merged tea leaf reading (often intuitive, interpretive) with more
quantitative and image-based registers for reading the future. Some of them
are quite stunning.

So this Canadian clairvoyant would read with playing cards. She used two
decks for a reading, and many of her card decks ended up in a local archive
after she moved into long term care. I was able to display some of these
worn decks a few years ago here in London -- there were at least thirty
decks in this partial collection, and they ranged from old casino cards to
decks you would purchase at a gas station or general store, to promotional
decks for businesses, liquor, etc. Some were beautifully worn. Clients were
instructed to lay cards out in a grid pattern. If a client was seeking
advice from afar, she requested they lay out their grid at home and send
along a chart or representation of some kind. These archived charts are
themselves quite exquisite objects: maps of questions and concerns
translated into a language of four suits. This particular clairvoyant
accepted questions of all sorts, and to see all aspects of life translated
in that way is pretty remarkable. She claimed clairsentience on all
registers and so used the cards in league with her own knowledge.

A few years ago I visited my first medium here in London. I explained that
I was visiting half for a personal reading, half for "research." As we
talked about my interest in this particular clairvoyant the medium
excitedly exclaimed that her mother had visited the same woman while
pregnant decades before, and had received word that her soon-to-be-daughter
would be psychic. We chatted about the medium's self-published books, and I
later gifted her one that I had multiple copies of. I had displayed two of
this same book in an interactive work: referencing the medium's use of two
card decks in a reading, it invited visitors to pick up and leaf through
her books instead, seeking synchronicities, similarities, resonant images
and passages that might lend some kind of insight for their present moment.
Book-as-card-deck.

Happy weekend,
Ruth


On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 5:52 PM Jennifer Fisher <jefish at yorku.ca> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hi All,
>
>
>
> What an inspiring array of posts. The Age of Aquarius, as Arshiya has
> notes, marks an epoch of expanded consciousness and individual freedoms.
> This planetary alignment arrives as a moment of promise in expanded
> intuition where at the same time privacy is in danger of being eroded by
> the surveillance capitalism of big data. I resonate with Sally’s perception
> that the mood is at once “super-charged…and vulnerable.”
>
>
>
> It is interesting that Spiritualism arose at an affective climate of
> collective grief (the American Civil War) coinciding with emancipatory
> social movements, in particular abolitionist feminism. The current
> paranormal opening, likewise, arrives at the crest of collective grief
> stemming from the pandemic and Black Lives Matter. The tone of the moment
> was presciently anticipated by Okwui Enwezor whose posthumous Grief and
> Grievance: Art and Mourning in America is now on exhibition at the New
> Museum (
> https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-1
> ).
>
>
>
> But I wanted to pick up the thread of Renate and Tim’s work on
> sense/sensation signalled by Ann. It appears that touch and the tactile
> interface operate in relation to intuitive technologies such as the séance
> (where hands are held in a circle to create a current supporting
> mediumship), to Chrysanne’s aura photographs (which involved a tactile
> biofeedback interface to generate images), to the relationality of the
> Tarot reading (where the handling of cards has operated emblematically in
> allegories of touch since Caravaggio).
>
>
>
> In regard to the performativity of intuition: Ruth, I’d be interested in
> hearing more about the staging of the playing card cartomancy of the
> Canadian clairvoyant you mention; and Bev, might you envision the role
> touch in reading your new Tarot cards?
>
>
>
> And on the documenting of the séance: Serena, do the mediums in the
> Hamiltons’ photographs directly address the photographers when in a spirit
> circle? Chrysanne, how did you orchestrate the aura photographs to have
> non-English-speaking subjects peer directly at the lens (as many of your
> compelling subjects do) with their hands on the biofeedback interfact.
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



-- 
http://www.ruthskinner.com

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 5:52 PM Jennifer Fisher <jefish at yorku.ca> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hi All,
>
>
>
> What an inspiring array of posts. The Age of Aquarius, as Arshiya has
> notes, marks an epoch of expanded consciousness and individual freedoms.
> This planetary alignment arrives as a moment of promise in expanded
> intuition where at the same time privacy is in danger of being eroded by
> the surveillance capitalism of big data. I resonate with Sally’s perception
> that the mood is at once “super-charged…and vulnerable.”
>
>
>
> It is interesting that Spiritualism arose at an affective climate of
> collective grief (the American Civil War) coinciding with emancipatory
> social movements, in particular abolitionist feminism. The current
> paranormal opening, likewise, arrives at the crest of collective grief
> stemming from the pandemic and Black Lives Matter. The tone of the moment
> was presciently anticipated by Okwui Enwezor whose posthumous Grief and
> Grievance: Art and Mourning in America is now on exhibition at the New
> Museum (
> https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-1
> ).
>
>
>
> But I wanted to pick up the thread of Renate and Tim’s work on
> sense/sensation signalled by Ann. It appears that touch and the tactile
> interface operate in relation to intuitive technologies such as the séance
> (where hands are held in a circle to create a current supporting
> mediumship), to Chrysanne’s aura photographs (which involved a tactile
> biofeedback interface to generate images), to the relationality of the
> Tarot reading (where the handling of cards has operated emblematically in
> allegories of touch since Caravaggio).
>
>
>
> In regard to the performativity of intuition: Ruth, I’d be interested in
> hearing more about the staging of the playing card cartomancy of the
> Canadian clairvoyant you mention; and Bev, might you envision the role
> touch in reading your new Tarot cards?
>
>
>
> And on the documenting of the séance: Serena, do the mediums in the
> Hamiltons’ photographs directly address the photographers when in a spirit
> circle? Chrysanne, how did you orchestrate the aura photographs to have
> non-English-speaking subjects peer directly at the lens (as many of your
> compelling subjects do) with their hands on the biofeedback interfact.
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



-- 
http://www.ruthskinner.com
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