Triangulating Technology and Magic through Artistic Research

Scholars have amply demonstrated that, far from being opposed, magic and technology are often, perhaps always, complementary: technology advances not by overcoming magic, but by incorporating and amplifying it;¹ magic persists not in spite of technological advances, but precisely because such advances inspire and energize it.² All of this might rightly lead to questioning whether the conceptual distinctions sometimes drawn between magic and technology (as noted in Ostling's introduction, 170) are well founded, but we take a different approach.

As a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who co-teach a seminar/studio course on magic and technology at MIT (to students who are overwhelmingly engineers and scientists), we view both magic and technology as ways in which the mind extends into the world and the world extends into the mind. As a method of perceiving the mind's interaction with the physical world, art offers an ideal means for students to study and research the manifold ways magic and technology can mediate human experience. Combining magic and technology through art, we work with students to illuminate liminal moments of passage across thresholds between interior and exterior, subject and object, self and other, animate and inanimate.

For instance, in one experiment, students took an human of a face, distorted it algorithmically, and projected it through a coarse LED display, which, in turn, they could distort further with filtering screens (see Figure 1). By toggling parameters of this imaging system, students could experientially examine the perceptual building blocks of pareidolia, the psychological penchant for detecting meaning—seeing faces, sensing agency—in ambiguous stimuli.³

What, we asked, might this teach us about the phenomenology of the numinous more broadly?

Interrogated in these terms, threshold experiences provide a basis for innovation in both artistic production and anthropological inquiry. We frame this method as "artistic research," a way of simultaneously conducting social science by making art and making art by doing social science that builds on precedents in both our fields.⁴

Entitled "Paranormal Machines," our course gives students an opportunity to engage in artistic research using the resources of the MIT Museum Studio, a perception and experimental exhibition workshop integrating artistic and scientific methodologies, to create works of art that engage with the anthropology of otherworldly experience. We developed the course in conversation with Peter Bebergal, a Cambridge-based writer whose book Strange Frequencies explores the imaginative potential of art that breaks down distinctions between magic and technology.⁵ Proceeding in this vein, our pedagogical practice also breaks down disciplinary divisions between art as a mode of expressive production and anthropology as a mode of hermeneutic interpretation.

One way of thinking about magic, broadly conceived, is as a system of technologies for breaching supposed boundaries between mind and world. Technologies of paranormal experience thrive on "weak circuits" of communication,⁶ where signal and noise are virtually indistinguishable, inviting

Figure 1.

The class contemplating the experiential effects of an experimental imaging system. Photograph © Graham M. Jones, 2019.

the mind into experience of the world. For instance, we draw inspiration from systems of divination that produce opportunities for insight from the patterns that emerge on the cusp of order and disorder,⁷ like images scried in the imperfect mirror of a glass of water, meanings captured in the fall of bones thrown on a cloth. Following models such as this, we explore how ambiguous meanings heighten awareness of other possible realities and, in so doing, foreground the role of perceptual and cognitive construction in the world we experience.

Anthropologists of the paranormal use ethnographic techniques to apprehend the threshold experiences that make magical practices real for participants and practitioners, but they run up against the limitations of their primary epistemic technology: the written word. In writing about ambiguity it is hard not to destroy it by imposing interpretive closure; it may require means beyond the written word to adequately (one hesitates to say "accurately") convey ambiguity to students.

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