Toward a Minor Tech:Xenodata

Media Art and the Question of Scientific Witchery [working title]

Recent media art practices turn to speculative narratives of magic, witchcraft, rituals, shamanism and other knowledge systems long marginalised in a hyper-optimised and hard-science-reliant capitalist discourse. Various roots can be traced here, from decolonial critiques and ancestral knowledge to anarchist connections with the occult and revival of witch-feminisms, all aiming to de-centre Western rational imaginaries of technology. They hence speak from alternative epistemic positions, and translocal perspectives - “minor tech” such as those offered by indigenous AI or feminist technoscience.

At the same time, such media artworks raise questions about the role of aesthetic modes and methods of resistance to the epistemic violence. What exactly does it mean to appeal to “magic” in the age of hegemonic Western knowledge systems? What other epistemic points of tension, besides institutional and decolonial critique, do these appeals engage in? The practices of Choy Ka Fai and Omsk Social Club offer a starting point in the investigation of how epistemic relationships change in the address to the “magical”.

While the predominant mode of operation in technoscience necessitates the disenchantment of the world (Stengers) to attain universal facts about nature, magic alludes to diverse practices of creating knowledge through transcendental forces. Magic is as much a practice of producing, sharing and deepening knowledge as technoscience is; however, as an epistemic system, it is put into the context of hierarchical regimes of “truths” and “non-truths”, where myth and magic have been pushed to the roadside of modernity by the techno-rationalist discourse.

As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues, Anthropocene-thinking requires reassessing the predominant modes of operation in order to consider the heterogeneity of living and being in the world, accounting for a multiplicity of ontologies. Against the techno-capitalist drive to reduce and enforce hegemonic universal claims and exclude other ways of understanding the world, myth-making provides a framework for reflecting on how the world is, explaining what is real or important. In this sense, magical practices can be considered a mechanism for ontological pluralism - acceptance of the different modes of being.

Furthermore, if we follow Arjun Appadurai, capitalism itself, with its techno-scientific rationality, could be considered a new magical imaginary, “the dreamwork of industrial modernity, its magical, spiritual and utopian horizon, in which all that is solid melts into money” (481). Calculation and speculation that predict future values in pursuit of growth and innovation are the mechanisms with which new frontiers are not only assumed but subjugated under this logic. Therefore, the question lies not only in the opposition of magic to technoscience within rationality-irrationality binary, but also in how exactly both are invested in belief and dreaming, in the process complicating the role of representation and aesthetic expression.

For Federico Campagna, Magic opposes Technic as two of the many possible “reality-settings” - “implicit metaphysical assumptions that define the architecture of our reality, and that structure our contemporary existential experience” (4). Furthermore, he positions Magic as an alternative to Technic: if Technic’s first-order principle is the knowability of all things through language, Magic’s first and original principle is that of the “ineffable”, where “the ineffable dimension of existence is that which cannot be captured by descriptive language, and which escapes all attempts to put it to ‘work’ - either in the economic series of production, or in those of citizenship, technology, science, social roles and so on” (10). This is an important distinction in the quantified world of digital culture: “being put to work” means not only the physical labour process, but also various data being put to work within a statistical model, or being valorised in any other way.

How, then, do we deal with the issue of magic in the context of resistant tech practices? Magic, in the sense that we propose to consider here, activates a different modality of the word “belief” than the commodified beliefs within capitalism. Rather, belief stands for a long-denied possibility of an alternative political imaginary (one that, as Mark Fisher suggests, is excluded within capitalist realism). Within this system, belief can only be exercised within the confines of certain institutions and framings: a church, a hospital, a rave, an art space [1]. This is the core provocation of magic: it activates the systems of belief in a space where they are not supposed to be activated. By animating the thought process, magic opens it to the possibility of the Other, and makes apparent the flows of (political) energy in an embodied experience. Technology, in relation to magic, could also be liberated from being a despirited tool (such as hammer), or from being a magic-wand type solution to the world’s problems; it could remain in-between, as something that activates reality-system of magic in certain space-times inside techno-capitalist infrastructures.

Artists are good at creating the actual imaginal infrastructure that allows us to comprehend the architecture of the world through one’s vision and to move through it. Images are visual fictions that allow us to understand metaphysical systems to and beyond their limits. Lucille Olympe Haute in Cyberwitches Manifesto, for instance, foregrounds magic as a practice of resistance grounded in feminist ethics. She writes about technology and magic without hierarchical distinction: "Let's use social networks to gather in spiritual and political rituals. Let's use smartphones and tarot cards to connect to spirits. Let's manufacture DIY devices to listen to invisible worlds" (n.p.). In the ethos of the manifesto, technology is liberated from the burden of being rational and therefore is reinscribed back into the realm of ethico-political practice.

Choy Ka Fai’s audio-visual performance Tragic Spirits from his project Cosmic Wanderer investigates shamanistic rituals in Siberia in their histories and present constitutions, intersecting with broader environmental, technological and political shifts. It involves documentary sequences of the artist's journey, which are interjected by a human dancer on stage, whose movements are transmitted via motion capture to a virtual avatar of a shaman on screen. Instead of treating technology as a tool the work suggests the very interconnectedness of human, nature, ritual and technology, culminating in the phrase “I have arrived at the centre of the universe - the universe inside you [me]” (Choy Ka Fai). What Choy Ka Fai means is reaching a place and a state of deep connectedness attained through oscillation created by the many components of the ritual. The audio-visual experience intensifies to the point where the energy of vibration is felt as a bodily encounter with the reality-system of magic. We could think about it in the sense of a radical alterity, or what Viveiros de Castro calls ontological pluralism. The connection between the documentary film, the dancer, the music and the avatar creates a closed circuit loop between the bio-techno-kinetics and their representation on the screen; in doing so, it also weaves the “blackbox” of technology within a sacred rite, and the viewers - within it. Like in a ritual, the viewers experience the shaman’s transcendence, but they don’t make the same journey that she does. Yet this is, precisely, one of the major points of the work: the unknowable must be confronted, seen, heard and experienced without being subsumed.

Omsk Social Club’s uses LARPing (Live Action Role Play) as a way to create and experience alternate realities. In each work, a future scenario functions “as a form of post-political entertainment, in an attempt to shadow-play politics until the game ruptures the surface we now know as life” (Omsk Social Club). Some of the themes they explore include rave culture, survivalism, desire and positive trolling. The work S.M.I2.L.E., for instance, is a “mystic grassroot” ceremony (Omsk Social Club) that explores freedom from protocols of quantification and efficiency in the age of technological precision. The work is, at the same time, a critique of the communities that gather around eco-technological innovation, and a spiritual practice through which users [2] are exploring embodied synesthetic acts such as being blindfolded, sensory deprivation, fasting and dancing. These allow users to reach a state of clarity that connects nature and technology and potentially gain alternative perspectives on community and life. The work reactivates machine-human relations as politically engaged, bodily ritual experiences. By creating LARPs, Omsk Social Club breaks the limits imposed on belief systems by the frameworks set by institutions. In doing so, both unlike and like Ka Fai’s work, they create “states that could potentially be fiction or a yet unlived reality” (Omsk Social Club) - possibilities to explore technology within new sets of imaginary politics.

Returning to our earlier proposition to treat magic as a capacity for opening up a “reality-system” of belief in the places where it is not supposed to be activated, we are left facing a few questions: what other spaces of thinking and acting, especially politically, does magic open for artists and participant-viewers of the artworks? If Choy Ka Fai weaves technology within a historical ritual, Omsk Social Club relates technology to the practice of making fictions. Where else should we look in order to address the political urgency of the current resisting practices? And what spaces are opened in positioning these practices in relation (or in opposition) to the myths of techno-rationality and the trope of science disenchanting the world?

Endnotes

1. It is also not by mistake that the most popular magical story of the last thirty years essentially places magic in a bureaucratised environment of a school.
2. The “users” seems to be chosen by Omsk Social Club to underline the role of the ceremony as a quasi-technology or software for the participants to make use of.

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Afterword: The Dreamwork of Capitalism’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 35, no. 3, 2015, pp. 481–85.

Campagna, Federico. Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.

Ka Fai, Choy. Tragic Spirits. Audio-visual performance, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTOn0WtaFA&ab_channel=CosmicWander%E7%A5%9E%E6%A8%82%E4%B9%A9.

Olympe Haute, Lucile. ‘Cyberwitches Manifesto’. Cyberwitches Manifesto, 2019, https://lucilehaute.fr/cyberwitches-manifesto/2019-FEMeeting.html.

OMSK Social Club. S.M.I2.L.E. Ceremony, Volksbühne Berlin, 2019, https://www.omsksocial.club/smi2le.html.

Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Reclaiming Animism’. E-Flux, July 2012, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. ‘On Models and Examples: Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene’. Current Anthropology, vol. 60, no. S20, Aug. 2019, pp. S296–308.