Notes for a Séance: Towards a Technology of the Spirit

The Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin) is pleased to present Notes for a Séance: Towards a Technology of the Spirit, a special evening of discussions and screenings organized in cooperation with the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale of the Seoul Museum of Art. The presenters include Anton Vidokle, Angela Melitopoulos, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Elena Vogman, and will feature films and video works by Jane Jin Kaisen, Yin-Ju Chen and Shana Moulton. This event is free, but registration is required, here.

The practice of séances—attempts to make contact with voices and worlds on different scales beyond the living, through the agency of a medium—flourished during the social transformations of the early modernist period. This was symptomatic of an explosion of popular interest in Spiritualism, the occult, mysticism, and syncretic religion as emotional and imaginative alternatives to the stress and alienation of an increasingly mechanistic, regimented, and rationalist industrial society. These practices and ideas would come to influence the work of myriad vanguard artists.

Over the course of the intervening century, formats as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatre came to be referred to as séances (the word might literally be translated as ‘sittings’). Now—in a comparably traumatic period, characterized by the same disorientation, anxiety, and insecurity—it is not surprising that many artists are looking to make connections with other worlds. In doing so, they seek emancipation from the structures—capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism—that shape lived realities. Their practices are not obscurantist or reactionary; they do not dismiss scientific inquiry out of hand so much as trouble the marriage of technology and anti-rationalism. If they are united by anything, it is their rejection of the exploitative logics of industrial capitalism, in favor of a technology of the spirit.

Along these lines, biennale artistic directors Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis will discuss their ongoing research for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Elena Vogman will introduce the media experiments practiced by the reform and resistance movement of institutional psychotherapy. Angela Melitopoulos will present a cine-somatic excursus with excerpts from her Cine(so)matrix exhibition related to animism.

Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis are the biennale artistic directors of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025). In 2023, they co-curated the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema at the Power Station of Art.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is principal investigator of the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus University Weimar and a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin.

Angela Melitopoulos is an artist and researcher in the time-based arts, including experimental single-channel tapes, video installations, video essays, documentaries, and sound pieces. In her practice she explores the production of subjectivity and collective memory in the context of mobility, migration, and geography.

Screening program
Jane Jin Kaisen: Wreckage (2024, 12 minutes)
Wreckage reflects on war, memory, and its aftermath. Underwater footage of a turbulent sea is overlaid with a 1945 US Army film shot in Jeju, showing soldiers dumping Japanese weapons into the ocean. Just years later, during the US-backed Jeju 4.3 Massacre, civilians were killed or fled by sea. This loss echoes in a lament by shaman Koh Sunahn, a survivor whose voice shifts between a grieving mother and her son, lost to the waves. Kaisen documented her shamanic practice for over a decade until her death.

Yin-Ju Chen: Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, there is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 16 minutes)
Drawing on a poem by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, this film is an account of a healing process and a meditation on human suffering, reflecting on the passing of the artist’s mother. Combining found footage, documentation from the artist’s own travels, and animations of the mythological centaur Chiron (renowned as a healer and prophet), Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong… asks how spiritual practice can help us to move beyond individual subjectivity to perceive life and death from a cosmic perspective.

Shana Moulton: Whispering Pines 9 (2009, 10 minutes)
In her Whispering Pines series Shana Moulton explores the nuances of the contemporary psyche, delving into the intricacies of self-help culture, the quest for spiritual meaning, and the often comedic absurdity of personal wellness rituals. Through the experiences of her alter ego, Cynthia, she writes a narrative that is both personal and universally resonant, probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical in the time of global digital capitalism.