Reading: Ritual

Update from my end on the research. Some notes from Erik Davis's "TechGnosis" that apply to the Ritual category:

• The speed & mutability of current technoscience times evokes supernatural qualities.
• Technology has "demystified" the world, but this mysticism is actually hiding in cultural, psychological, and mythological areas. It comes back as well, perhaps without our knowing (ex: how Christian myths have framed technological/economic growth)
• ICT shapes the human self by encoding thought & experience. Partially reconstructing this self and world leads to new interpretation. These constructions of our reality consist of (1) form (medium, crafted/constructed) and (2) content (transmission of mind & meaning). This content can be further divided into two parts: soul and spirit. Soul is analog, continuous, and entrenched in social context. Spirit is characterized by clarity and discrete signals (digital).
  
• People are now cut off from their analog souls by science & technology, and try to recreate it with these digital versions - technology is not a mere tool.

The "Great Divide" from Latour's "We Have Never Been Modern" is also mentioned: nature and culture were once interwoven and indistinguishable (ex: how an Inuit experiences his dreams and hunting the following day), but the Modern Wall has wedged itself in between. Now culture is struggling to develop independently of nature, through new technologies, even though these spiritual needs are re-manifesting themselves.

Also starting to read up on Debord's "Society of the Spectacle," and the Situationists, don't know exactly where this will lead.

Round 2: Shamanism & Sacrifice (Connie)

The Shamanic Ritual concept examines the ritual of accessing information beyond one's immediate grasp. Requesting answers in the past was a significant ordeal: an invoking sacrifice, fasting or hallucinogens to attain visions, or significant group effort facilitated by the "chosen." With information today so easily at one's hand (or pocket), the humbling restriction of not knowing or remembering is lost.

While enlightenment will always be phenomenological, what AR can bring to this new interpretation is a uniform "vision" to be interpreted by a group.

The direction is to induce an immersive, storytelling and role-playing experience for group access of the archive. A signature interaction from the past would be carried through, perhaps a "modern sacrifice." The initial vision is for this to take place either on-site at Beeld & Geluid, or at a special event.

Instead of forcing this interaction on all queries, perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to come up with questions that would merit this modern sacrifice. A fun idea a friend and I did once was to ask only other people for answers that would typically be asked of Google, and on the flip side, to ask Google fuzzy, ambiguous questions (ex: "What do you think of my love life?").

analog AR

As touched upon in the previous post, people have been augmenting reality way before there was this fetish for computer vision.

Here is Where: a project that rediscovers (lackluster) physical locations through historical accounts. New York Times article that describes the project.

“It’s sort of a reverse scavenger hunt,” he said. “Trying to find things that aren’t there.”

Other things to look at could be shamanism or other rituals in which people initiate this accessing of information that is not there. (Often this refers to the physical perceptible reality.) More to come.