Notes for a Séance

This event introduces ideas informing the curatorial imagination for the 13th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Through three presentations and corresponding screenings, the artistic directors will explore the intersection of mysticism, the occult, art, technology, and society across histories, geographies, and cultures. The event will share and discuss concepts such as: the relationship of mysticism, death, and immortality; the séance as a metaphor for navigating between presence and absence, or conscious and unconscious; the role of technopolitics; and other key ideas.

Part 1. Death, Art, and Spirituality

Anton Vidokle will speak to the centrality of death and the pursuit of immortality in mystical and spiritual practices throughout history, and the impact this has made on the development, iconography, and language of art. The presentation will focus on how the relationship between the living and the dead in mystical traditions has shaped key aspects of spiritualism and esoteric philosophies, and how these ideas, in turn, transformed the arts during modernity and into the present. In this context, Vidokle will introduce the concept of cosmism, a speculative philosophical movement which saw the potential for religion, technology, science, and new forms of social organization to overcome the limits of human mortality, inadvertently triggering an entirely new imaginary for art, music, literature, poetry, cinema, theater, and architecture.

Part 2. Mediating the Invisible: Spiritual, Cinematic, and Psychoanalytical Séances

Lukas Brasiskis will explore three different meanings of the concept of the séance–spiritual séance, cinematic séance, and psychoanalytical séance–widely practiced in the West at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. These interpretations of the French word are unified by the critical concept of absence. In each iteration of séance, a central act is the attempt to reach what is hidden, absent, or unintelligible, and thereby to make it visible, accessible, or conscious. This mediation is crucial to understanding how these practices operate on the boundaries between different worlds—between the living and the dead, the conscious and unconscious, the real and imaginary. Through unpacking each of them, the presentation will suggest that—whether engaging with spirits, projected images, or repressed thoughts—each form of séance becomes a way to access what is invisible, hidden, or absent, momentarily bridging different realms of existence.

Part 3. Contemporary Techno-Mysticism and its Discontents

Hallie Ayres will examine the relationship between contemporary technology, spirituality, and the automation of the mind. Analyzing how post-Fordist capitalism has shifted from the automation of the body to the automation of the mind and spirit, Ayres illuminates how this transition marks a significant change in how technology shapes not only labor but also consciousness, spirituality, and cultural relativism. By highlighting practices that seek to mitigate the Western impulse toward compartmentalizing natural phenomena into discrete taxonomic dichotomies, the presentation will offer cursory proposals for a technology of the spirit that takes as its foundation the fundamental premise of interconnectedness across the veils between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the explainable universe and its penchant for defying rationality.