Notes for a Séance: Towards a Technology of the Spirit

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 favour of a technology of the spirit.

Along these lines, biennale curators 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.

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.