“The Medium is a Medium — Intersecting Technology and Spirituality in a More-than-human World” is a performance lecture that brings together 19th century Spiritualism and seances with 21st century AI technologies such as ChatGPT and Dall-E. Through a spectral method of communing with ghosts in the archive, the work addresses the transcendence of the biological limits of death through technology and the spectres of AI.

The first iteration of this performance has been presented at the Transmission in Motion Seminar series at Utrecht University in May 2023, and is currently in further development.

Abstract:

Belief and imagination underlie our use of technology. In the edited volume, Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural (2019), contributors demonstrate how technologies cannot be analysed outside “the system of beliefs and performative rituals that inform and prepare their use” (Natale and Pasulka 3). One core belief identified in the book pertains to the notion that technology may help us transcend the biological limit of death by creating artificial life. Indeed both technological developments as well as cultural imaginaries in popular culture address the desire of some to achieve immortality through virtual avatars, chatbots, holograms, robots and other means. For instance, Black Mirror‘s Be Right Back episode (2013; Season 2 Episode 1) features computer-generated conversations with a husband after his death, who is eventually even embodied in a robot replica. In real-life developments, the chatbot application Replika was built by its creator to deal with grief after losing a beloved friend, and brought together a data archive of private messages and emails in order to generate a bot that would talk like him. VR company Somnium Space is offering a Live Forever mode in the metaverse that allows users to duplicate themselves in avatars. These attempts may be summarised through the term “legacy AI”, which focus on data preservation, management, as well as its creative usage beyond human biological death.

In this performance lecture, I approach this topic from a media-archaelogical manner, studying the ways in which the technology of the seance and spirit communication has been similarly used to transcend death. I draw on the dual definition of the term “medium” through Jeffrey Sconce’s work Haunted Media (2000) which addresses medium as mediation as well as medium as spirit contact. Specifically, I am interested in the notion of mediumship as a technology that defies death, and questions why the spiritual underpinnings of the term have been overshadowed by its technical definition in media studies. I look to Spiritualism, spirit telegraphy, and the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cables at the end of the 19th century to demonstrate how technological development was intricately bound together with spiritual beliefs. During this TiM seminar session, you are invited to join a seance to resurrect these minor histories, communicate with the spectres that haunt such technologies, and untangle the belief systems that sustain interest in legacy AI and the desire to live forever.