Issue 156—“Séance: Technology of the Spirit”

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale—curated by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, all of whom contribute essays to this companion issue of e-flux journal—starts from the premise that we are surrounded by other worlds. And that these worlds might be accessed through the mediation of technologies including, but not limited to, art.

That we are surrounded by other worlds can easily be demonstrated. Take, for example, my dog. He is restless this morning, will not settle in the bed I have moved into the patch of sunlight beside my desk. Perhaps he is unsettled by some high-pitched sound—from a faulty electrical appliance, let’s say—that is beyond my capacity to hear. Perhaps, when we went for a walk this morning, he detected on a favorite lamppost the scent of his neighborhood nemesis, a belligerent miniature schnauzer, and is now plotting his revenge.  

I don’t know, because his world is not accessible to me. My sense of smell is not so acute, my range of hearing much narrower. That these phenomena are outside the realm of my perception—that I cannot see or hear them—does not make them any less real. Nor is the world constructed out of these smells and sounds any less complete than the particular nutshell in which I am trapped. My dog does not realize that the ceramic tiles of the floor across which he is pacing are patterned red and black. In this respect my more ocular reality is richer. But he has the advantage of being able to sense the presence of that schnauzer long after he has left my world, in which he lingers like the unseen ghost of a recently departed neighbor.

There might be some technology that allows me to enter my dog’s world. Goggles that transform smells into colors so that I, too, could know which friends or enemies had recently been hanging around my door; a sensor that would alert me to the high whine of the broken air-conditioning unit that will burn down my apartment. These new technologies might expand the scope of my reality, reveal phenomena that are no less impactful on my life for being otherwise imperceptible, and explain the behavior of the other beings with whom I share a living space. (In “Art as Technique,” Viktor Shklovsky uses Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” to exemplify the strategy of defamiliarization through which a revolutionary art might change our social relations. The story is written from the point of view of a horse.)

It is a secondary premise of the exhibition—which presents the work of fifty artists from the mid-nineteenth century to the present—that we might think of art as one such technology. To that end, the biennale is conceived of as a “séance,” which is to say, a mediated experience through which we might receive communications, however fragmentary and incomplete, from other worlds. By these means we might be made able to see through another set of eyes, to move through a world built of unfamiliar perceptions and precepts, perhaps even momentarily to slip the prison of subjectivity entirely.

In doing so, these works of art expand the limits of our everyday reality, connecting us to what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that lies beyond. James makes the point, later advanced by Karen Barad, that our perception is structured by culture as much as biology: we see what we are raised to see, hear what we are conditioned to hear. One useful analogy, developed in a section of the exhibition curated by Sanna Almajedi and devoted to sound, is with radio. If you want to make practicable sense of the messages fizzing through the airwaves, it is best to tune your antenna to a single frequency and remain there. But it can be rewarding occasionally to run through the dial, to listen to other channels, and to be reminded that not only are there many other worlds, to paraphrase Paul Éluard, but they are in this one.

In an essay that introduces the exhibition’s central premise, Anton Vidokle argues that the development of modern and contemporary art cannot be understood independently of the spiritual revolutions of the turn of the twentieth century, which were in turn catalyzed by the spread of industrialized modernity. He moreover suggests that the alienating social changes of that period—and the corresponding search for connection and spiritual meaning—might shed light on our own unsettled present.

To acknowledge the historical connection between art and spiritual experience should not, as Maria Lind argues in her reflections on the recent “rediscovery” of Hilma af Klint, mean simply shoehorning a few token works of devotional art into the modernist canon. Instead, as a conversation with Alexandra Munroe on the syncretic religion of Oomoto and its cofounder, Onisaburō Deguchi, makes clear, this recognition requires that we reconsider the ideological foundations on which that canon has been constructed.

Hallie Ayres argues for the re-enchantment of everyday life as one means of resisting the separation of spirit from body and meaning from material, while Namsee Kim draws attention to the disastrous consequences of dismissing everything beyond the range of human apprehension as unreal and by extension meaningless.

As “a fortune teller at the end of a (the?) world,” Johanna Hedva first rails against the despair that follows the awareness that we are caught in deterministic systems beyond our influence, and then reflects on the continued need for growth, resistance, and anger. Hwang Rushi’s feminist reading of the legend of Princess Bari—abandoned daughter, founder of Korean shamanism, and companion to the dead on their journey to the underworld—offers a welcome reminder that while material wealth and inherited privilege might have corrupted the terrestrial societies in which we live, they carry no weight in other realms.

Art is by no means the only conduit to worlds beyond our everyday experience. Essays by Lukas Brasiskis and Elena Vogman reflect on the entwined histories of cinema and psychoanalysis—both of which emerged from the same milieux as spiritualist séances, and borrowed their techniques—and their capacity to reconstruct our social and psychological relations. Nikolay Smirnov further explores the relationship of film to dream, mythology, and identity in his study of the Indigenous cinema of Yakutia, while Daniel Muzyczuk expounds on the capacity of music to both transport us to other worlds and construct entirely new ones.

As a complement to the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, this collection of essays works against the presumption that the world we inhabit—as individuals, as communities, as a species—precludes all others. The world as we perceive it is not the sum of all reality. Or, as John Berger puts it, “The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.”

—Ben Eastham

The editors would like to thank the team at Seoul Museum of Art for their work towards the catalogue for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, in which the essays included here will be published. We would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Jihee Jun and Jin Kwon in this respect.

Anton Vidokle—Death, Art, and Spirituality
We are living through a profound transformation of life and perception—driven by digitalization, algorithmic automation, and artificial intelligence. As with earlier technological upheavals, these shifts have brought about widespread anxiety, disorientation, and a renewed sense of alienation. The global resurgence of nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism is one symptom of this deeper unease. In response, many contemporary artists are turning—once again—to mysticism, spirituality, and nonhuman ways of knowing to make sense of the present.

Johanna Hedva—What Is the Opposite of an Epiphany? Notes at a Dawning
At some point this spring, I started to add the quasi-philosophical question: What exactly is the difference between an ending and a beginning? I asked this because I’d like to know. I was curious what in my clients’ lives was arriving with any insight, distinct markers of time changing, feelings of agency. If a portal flings itself open, what propels someone through?

Lukas Brasiskis—Cinema and Séance
We inhabit a world shaped by spectral interactions mediated through digital screens and networks, in which Derrida’s “technological ghost” has become an everyday reality. The texture of our historical moment is characterized by intimacy at a distance, proximity without physical contact, and instant connectivity devoid of emotional empathy.

Elena Vogman—Séance: Technology of Disalienation
Institutional psychotherapy theorized madness as a double estrangement: both mental and social alienation of the self from its “participation in the environment.” Undertaking a Marxist rereading of psychoanalysis, the movement operated via group therapies and a radical restructuring of psychiatric institutions, involving patients in their capacity to actively participate in each other’s healing processes.

Hallie Ayres—Unreformed Images
In locales outside Blavatsky’s European context, by contrast, a contemporaneous boom in spiritualism and religious sectarianism was to some degree born of the desire to curb Western influence. Rather than form entirely new belief systems, scholars and religious practitioners tended to redefine existing folk spiritual practices in accordance with a nationalism that sought to construct a coherent national identity in opposition to the West. Paradoxically, this effort often vanquished the very folk practices on which that nationalism rested.

Hwang Rushi—Princess Bari
She is a being worthy of thanks as she gently carries grieving souls to the afterlife with the same devotion with which she saved the parents who abandoned her, the same warmth and compassion with which she soothed the souls she met along the road to the underworld, and with the quiet confidence of having successfully braved a journey into the unknown. Today, Princess Bari is the only salvation and hope for the deceased and the family that loved them.

Anton Vidokle and Koichiro Osaka—On Oomoto: A Conversation with Alexandra Munroe
For Oomoto, learning these arts was a form of active meditation. Drawing from both Shinto ceremonial tradition and Zen Buddhism, Oomoto saw the arts of preparing tea, calligraphy, or aikido as spiritual practices whose aesthetics traced cosmic energies. These arts were acts of purification and offering, ways of becoming one with your surroundings. It’s all about encounter and communion. In the 1970s, these traditional arts came to form the summer seminar curriculum of the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts.

Daniel Muzyczuk—Angels and Demons
Sound telepathy is a phenomenon that recurs at unexpected junctures in the history of music. A famous—and probably apocryphal—anecdote connects it to Anton Webern and his use of the compositional marking “pensato”: a sound so quiet that it can only be thought by the performer. This note should not be manifested as a wave perceptible by hearing, but as a mental vibration that could be transmitted from one mind to another.

Namsee Kim—Summoning the Beings of Metamorphosis
“The fantastic” occupies the boundary between the two, forcing the reader “to hesitate … between a natural interpretation or a supernatural interpretation.” When it is impossible to decide whether the laws of reality hold or whether new natural laws must be assumed, the hesitation that arises in the absence of complete disbelief or absolute faith is the condition of “the fantastic.”

Nikolay Smirnov—Who Speaks During a Séance?
I read the “non-Western” spiritual beliefs of Sakha through the lens of Western esotericism because I propose that their reinvention is part of a shared late–New Age historical moment. For many people today, esotericism serves as a broad alternative to both empirical science as a hegemonic worldview and the dominant world religions, as well as a way to escape modern imperialism, colonialism, and oppression. Knowledge that resists these tendencies is found not only in non-Western traditions, but also in “pre-modern” Western traditions.

Maria Lind—Traces of Cosmos: Notes on Hilma af Klint’s Paintings and Their Reception
We cannot consider her oeuvre without placing it in the wider context of human consciousness and morality, asking what it means to behold works of art that were created clandestinely for an audience of like-minded believers. Wanting to maintain a position beyond the art market is legitimate. But what does it entail to partake in the public sphere of the mainstream art world, and to actively refrain from it?