Convention of cranks: Why the nineteenth century’s golden age of pseudoscience may be a precursor of our own, by Rob MacDougall

Pravda, Russian for “truth”, was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party from the start of the Bolshevik Revolution to the final days of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of Soviet communism, Pravda fell on predictably hard times. The newspaper was sold to foreign owners, who reinvented it in the 1990s as a rather shameless supermarket tabloid. The pages that once delivered the ponderous dictates of the Kremlin were given over to breathless reports on extra-terrestrial invaders, ghostly apparitions, and the curative properties of goat testicles. This may be a fitting fate for a newspaper whose truth was never much more than titular. But Pravda’s transformation (liberation? decline?) strikes me as a kind of metaphor for our whole information environment, as we pass from the top-down mass media of the twentieth century to the interactive digital media of the twenty-first.

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The New Motor: Building the ‘God Machine’

In October of 1853 in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, a group of people congregated under the watchful eye of a man named John Murray Spear, gathered together to begin work on a mysterious machine, an experiment that has since become synonymous with the early spiritualist movement. If successful, they believed that the machine in question had the power to “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.” It was thought that once finished, the machine itself would act as a physical body for God, a metal and copper suit to contain the divine spark. They called it the New Motor; Heaven’s last, best gift to man.

A former minister of the Universalist church in Barnstable Massachusetts, John Murray Spear was well-known for having maintained very outspoken views regarding the issues of slavery and women’s rights. In Portland, Maine during an anti-slavery speech in the heart of the city, he was beaten senseless by an angry mob, a beating which left him incapacitated for many months. However, this didn’t stop Spear from continuing to minister to three separate churches until the year 1852, when he broke ties with the Universalist Church for good. It was around this time that Spear joined an ever growing community that had begun calling themselves “spiritualists“. In later generations, despite his activism, this would become the topic his name was most notably attached to. Spear spent years devoted to developing his abilities as a trance medium, and eventually, he came to believe he was being guided by the spirits of notable scientists Emanuel Swedenborg and Benjamin Franklin.

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Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology

 Science Museum, London, UK

10 December 2013 - 26 October 2014

Free admission

Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology, explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years.

Divided into four episodes between 1780 and 2014, this exhibition looks at key breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of the mind and the tools and methods of treatment that have been developed, from Mesmerism to Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) bringing visitors up to date with the latest cutting edge research and its applications.

Bringing together psychology, other related sciences, medicine and human stories, the exhibition is illustrated through a rich array of historical and contemporary objects, artworks and archive images.

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quote

Everyone may be educated and regulate his imagination so as to come thereby into contact with spirits, and be taught by them.

Paracelsus, Philosophia sagax

An Occult History of the Television Set

The origin of the television set was heavily shrouded in both spiritualism and the occult, Stefan Andriopoulos writes in his new book Ghostly Apparitions. In fact, as its very name implies, the television was first conceived as a technical device for seeing at a distance: like the telephone (speaking at a distance) and telescope (viewing at a distance), the television was intended as an almost magical box through which we could watch distant events unfold, a kind of technological crystal ball.

Andriopoulos's book puts the TV into a long line of other "optical media" that go back at least as far as popular Renaissance experiments involving technologically-induced illusions, such as concave mirrors, magic lanterns, disorienting walls of smoke, and other "ghostly apparitions" and "phantasmagoric projections" created by specialty devices. These were conjuring tricks, sure—mere public spectacles, so to speak—but successfully achieving them required sophisticated understandings of basic physical factors such as light, shadow, and acoustics, making an audience see—and, most importantly, believe in—the illusion.

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The Crystal World Exhibition by Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp (2012)

Something of the universe’s unruliness, its filthy playful accident is rather more manifest in The Crystal World exhibition by Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp recently on at the Space White Building. Titled after J.G. Ballard’s novel of encroaching strangeness, here the earth is transformed into a gigantic grunge chemistry set. The chemist Dmitri Mendeleev famously found the final proportions of the periodic table in a dream after much intense work of experiment and calculation, and something similar is going on here. The exhibition proposes intense links between matter, abstraction and the fantastic, the combination of computation, accident and intuition. In the periodic table, matter proceeds along two axes with a gradually changing set of qualities arranged by atomic weight and atomic number, (a quality added later following work by Henry Moseley) changing in terms of conductivity, malleability, the ability to react with or combine with other materials and so on. The whole table, with each change arising from the accretion of one electron at a time, formulates, at a certain scale of analysis, all of the abundant expressivity of matter arising from what Mendeleev called the invisible world of chemical atoms.

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Article by Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp here

wiki here

Dead Media Archive

Media Archaeology
 
This course is devoted to media archaeology, that is, historical research into forgotten, obsolete, neglected or otherwise dead media technologies. Depending on our understanding of “media” — one of the questions we’ll discuss — these might include forms as diverse as typewriters, phonographs, Polaroid photography, prison tattoo codes and the Victorian language of floral bouquets, outmoded video game platforms, computing systems, and musical instruments, smoke signals, scent organs, shorthand notation, and rocket mail delivery. Our premise is that understanding these things can help us gain a better sense of the development, meaning and legacy of media technologies, now and in the future; our goal is to introduce students to the skills and resources necessary for producing rigorous research on such obsolete and obscure media. The course will include an exposure to scholarship in media archaeology; an intensive introduction to research methods; finding and exploring word, image, and sound archives; and the restoration of media artifacts to their deep social, cultural and personal context. The course stems from the premise that media archaeology is best undertaken, like any archaeological project, collaboratively: we will follow a hands-on research studio model commonly used in disciplines such as architecture or design.

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The DEAD MEDIA Project

Ever notice how many books there are about the Internet these days? About 13,493 so far, right? And how about "multimedia?" There are 8,784 books on this topic, even though no one has ever successfully defined the term. CD-ROM -- is there a single marketable topic left that hasn't been shovelwared into the vast digital mire that is CD-ROM? And how about the "Information Superhighway" and "Virtual Reality"? Every magazine on the planet has done awestruck vaporware cover stories on these two consensus-hallucinations.

Our culture is experiencing a profound radiation of new species of media. The centralized, dinosaurian one- to-many media that roared and trampled through the 20th century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment. The new media environment is aswarm with lumbering toothy digital mammals. It's all lynxes here, and gophers there, plus big fat venomous webcrawlers, appearing in Pleistocene profusion.

This is all well and good, and it's lovely that so many people are paying attention to this. Nothing gives me greater pleasure as a professional garage futurist than to ponder some weird new mutant medium and wonder how this squawking little monster is going to wriggle its way into the interstices between human beings. Still, there's a difference between this pleasurable contemplation of the technological sublime and an actual coherent understanding of the life and death of media. We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these new media technologies, and no consistent way even to discuss the subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation...

- The DEAD MEDIA Project
A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal
by Bruce Sterling

Read the manifesto here 

Index here

Looking Through the Occult: Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology in the 19th Century

In recent years the history of science has cast new light on how technical instrumentation in the nineteenth-century shaped conceptions of scientific objectivity as non-subjective and independent of human intervention. A parallel body of research in media studies has demonstrated how the contemporaneous rise of technical media (e.g. telegraphy, photography) informed spiritualistic beliefs that automated, technical inscriptions would provide faithful representation of a transcendental or spiritualistic world. Looking Through the Occult brings together scholars in media studies, the history of technology, science studies, and religious studies to consider how these phenomena may interrelate. We will ask questions such as:

• How did occult and spiritualistic beliefs in automatic writing relate to the scientific belief in “self-recording” instruments as a path towards an objectivity unperturbed by human intervention?
• How might nineteenth century intersections between scientific and esoteric styles of reasoning inform the way we understand present-day technological and social innovations, in particular those that may run counter to traditional forms of scientific and hegemonic reason?
• What shared forms of visual, graphical, and instrumental notation interpenetrate scientific , technological, and occult knowledge?
• Do present-day efforts to transcend space, time, and social difference via social and mobile media recapitulate earlier spiritualistic and technological aspirations?

Conference findings, which will be disseminated as podcasts and in an edited book, will contribute towards a broader synthesis of media and religious studies with research in the histories of technology, science, and cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken).

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Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley - Burn (2002)

Burn from Artstudio Reynolds on Vimeo.

Ancient Man Used “Super-Acoustics” to Alter Consciousness, (and Speak with the Dead?)

Researchers at a recent conference on “Archaeoacoustics: The Archaeology of Sound” studied the acoustic properties of a 5,000-years-old mortuary temple on the Mediterranean island of Malta. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is an underground complex created in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period as a depository for bones and a shrine for ritual use. In a chamber known as the “Oracle Room”, fabled for its eerie sound effects, scientists detected the presence of a strong double resonance frequency at 70Hz and 114Hz.

A deep male voice tuned to these frequencies stimulated a resonance phenomenon throughout the hypogeum, creating bone-chilling effects. It was reported that sounds echoed for up to 8 seconds during the testing. Archaeologist Fernando Coimbra reported that he felt the sound crossing his body at high speed, leaving a sensation of relaxation. When it was repeated, the sensation returned and he also had the illusion that the sound was reflected from his body to the ancient red ochre paintings on the walls. One can only imagine the experience in antiquity: standing in what must have been somewhat odorous dark and listening to ritual chant while low light flickered over the bones of one’s departed loved ones.

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Nevada Ghosts: LIFE at an A-Bomb Test, 1955

 In the spring of 1955, as the Cold War intensified and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated at a shocking pace, America — as it had many times before — detonated an atomic weapon in the Nevada desert. The test was not especially noteworthy. The weapon’s “yield” was not dramatically larger or smaller than that of previous A-bombs; the brighter-than-the-sun flash of light, the mushroom cloud and the staggering power unleashed by the weapon were all byproducts familiar to anyone who had either witnessed or paid attention to coverage of earlier tests.

And yet today, six decades later, at a time when the prospect of nuclear tests by “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran is once again making headlines and driving international negotiations and debate, the very banality of one long-forgotten atomic test in 1955 feels somehow more chilling than other more memorable or era-defining episodes from the Cold War. After all, whether conducted in the name of deterrence, defense or pure scientific research, the May 1955 blast (the results of which are pictured in this gallery) was in a very real sense routine.

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