“Modernity is a continuation of sacral tendencies by othermeans”:
Introduction to Technologies of the Sacred
Religious practices have always been tightly connected to technological mediation. Just recall the stories of the Old Testament’s Tabernacle, complex mathematics of Yoruba divination practices, Buddhist spiritual automation by prayer wheels, Japan’s history of robotics, smartphone astrology apps employing advanced neural networks or stories about Golem and all the other creatures inhabiting the space inbetween the natural, the mystical and the artificial. One can also dive deep into history of the divination practices and their present mutations. For example, machine learning algorithms are designed to anticipate the future based on learned models. Even though they are based in highly sophisticated technical systems, they have a foundational symbolic base in ancestral divination machines. The Antikythera mechanism, dated to 89 BCE, was composed of a complex system of at least thirty gears, with zodiac, months and eclipses, working as a kind of the astrolabe. According to scholar Michael Wright, it worked to calculate solar and lunar calendars in a similar way to the Archimedes’s planetarium. Unlike prophecies by oracles such as the priestess at Delphi—which as Steven Connor suggests had been made not to be heeded—algorithmic predictions are used for advertising and co-writing, but also policing and other forms of social control.
In this regard, the online exhibition Technologies of the Sacred has a very simple aim: to provide an incomplete list of the ways that the boundaries between technology on the one hand and magic, religion, or mysticism on the other have been blurred throughout the history of Western modernity. While the official narrative of this historical epoch has been the march towards an ever increasing disenchantment of the world by the means of instrumental rationality, there is another, untold story of a spiritual excess that accompanies all kinds of instrumental rationality. Suddenly, instead of the division between the rational and the irrational, the scientific and the spiritual, one can approach the disenchanted world of modernity as a continuation of sacral tendencies by other means.
Mediating the unknown
As an example, consider how mediating the unknown is a pursuit that creative and spiritual practice share with technology and science, often meeting at unexpected crossroads. For instance, the experience of people with synaesthesia_—such as the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, who perceived sounds as colour scales—is even more fascinating in light of the discovery that the conceptual logic and structure of Scriabin’s synaesthetic experiences are comparable to conceptual systems of Isaac Newton’s _Optics (1704). Historically, the emergence of abstraction as an artistic genre is linked both to the spiritual and to the technical: Hilma af Klint, František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky were all strongly influenced by theosophy and by the search for esoteric interpretations of the prominent technological and scientific advances of modernity, especially the technologies of vision: photography or detectors of ‘invisible forces’, X-ray generators and Geiger counters.
In 1895, Anna Bertha claimed “I've seen my death!” after being introduced to the spectral image of her own hand made by her husband, Wilhelm Röntgen. Today, we may experience a similar sense of wonder when we attempt to come to terms with the potential of emergent algorithmic creativity. Google’s artificial neural network DeepDream fascinated the world in 2015 with the trippysquirrel.jpg image, showing the ability of a machine to produce its own hallucinative dreams. The multidimensionality of neural nets—a dimensionality vastly different from the the ‘fourth dimension’ searched for by modernists—might be a way of replacing the binaries of modernity with a recognition of the full spectrum of the intelligence in the more-than-human world that has always surrounded us. As K Allado-McDowell mentions in their conversation with Danae Io, the multidimensionality of neural nets might give us tools for seeing and anticipating future possibilities, leading to more imaginative and magical ways of encountering synthetic intelligence.
Magical technics
One of the three famous laws of Arthur C. Clarke claims that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but with Technologies of the Sacred, we would like to go further. It is not enough to say that sometimes, some technologies happen to act like magical artifacts. One needs also to acknowledge that in its essence, the dichotomy between the technical and the magical is a geographically constrained historical aberration of Western culture, not a universal dilemma. To map the way to the terrain beyond this duality, the online exhibition Technologies of the Sacred is accompanied by two texts that interact with each other.
The first is a conversation between one of the artists in the exhibition, Danae Io, and co-leader of the Artist + Machine Intelligence program at Google Research, K Allado-McDowell. It leads beyond the duality of the technical and magical by provoking a question “What if technology were a prayer”? Allado-McDowell suggests that predictive algorithmic systems—which translate the unknown into infrastructure—can be either the tool for expanding human consciousness, or a tool for extraction and social control. Based on statistics, predictive algorithmic systems learn chiefly from data sets that originate from the particular social contexts and historical circumstances of modernity, with taxonomies and categorisations derived from the colonial expansion. According to Allado-McDowell, to re-envision such a premise, one must engage with the position of women, indigenous and earth-centered people and cosmologies. The process of appropriating technical platforms through local cosmological perspectives can then also lead from the dictates of the plausible to the multiverse of the possible.
The second text in this discursive layer of Technologies of the Sacred is an edited introductory chapter from Federico Campagna's book Technic and Magic(Bloomsbury, 2018) which calls for an appreciation of the magical as a legitimate category alongside the technical. Our belief is that, in the spirit of Campagna's project of the ‘reconstruction of reality’, reconfiguring the relationship between some strict dualities of Western modernity can be a step towards a new aesthetics and sensitivity with far-reaching consequences. It allows for a spontaneous multiplication of cosmological perspectives and for a careful negotiation of relations between cultures, communities and identities instead of hegemonic imposition, both in the domain of the human and the more-than-human. After all, it is all about doing some groundwork for cosmological battles we'll have to fight, once the hegemony of modernity—which still returns like a zombie onto our metaphysical backyard—finally collapses.