"TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information"

Erik Davis

Freelance Writer/Cultural Critic

Abstract: Arthur C. Clarke famously proclaimed that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. And despite the supposed triumph of secular materialism, the rhetoric of magic permeates advanced information culture. The examples are many: the pervasive use of magical metaphors in computer games and MUDs; the triumph of image-based advertising, which Raymond Williams described as "functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies;" the "tribal" qualities of many postmodern technocultures; the shamanic fantasies surrounding virtual reality and Gibsonian cyberspace, including Mark Pesce's visionary and overtly magical VRML campaign; even the digital animism of a-life.

Drawing from his forthcoming book "TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information," Erik Davis will put these disparate trends into technocultural context. Taking McLuhan's notion of electronic tribalism to the next (digital) level, Davis will begin with a pragmatic and media-savvy definition of magic as a virtual theater where shamans and sorcerors shaped social reality by performing it into existence. Using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, these magicians applied techne to the social imagination, creatively manipulating phantasms in order to engineer the perceptions, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche. Not necromancy, but neuromancy.

With this as a backdrop, Davis will peer into the history of phantasms in order to open up the digital imagination. He will discuss the ancient Art of Memory, and trace this mnemonic techne through Dante and Renassiance magic into the hypertext hieroglyphics of the World Wide Web. Davis will also explore the role of magic in computer games, from Adventure to MUDs to the latest RPGs, arguing that this curiously persistent trope reveals a great deal about the semiotics of computer interfaces and the nature of virtual worlds.

The archaic and occult metaphors that cluster around new technologies are not inconsequential to the digital future. Indeed, our increasaingly complex and overwhelming information environment may be spontaneously inculcating what James Burke and Robert Ornstein call the "arational thinking" of earlier days, a mode of consciousness based on intuition, spatial navigation, imaginative leaps, and fuzzy rules-of-hand. While dangerous in some ways, this change of perspective is also an opportunity to reinject vision into a high-tech culture industry dominated by the "bad magic" of advertising and perception management. As a design principle and active metaphor, magic may be capable of encouraging people to discover their own potential for rigorous creative fantasy, and to reconnect their disembodied information labor within the ancient matrix of an ever-dreaming earth.

Biography: ERIK DAVIS is a San Franciso-based writer, culture critic, and independent scholar. His book "TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information," which Bruce Sterling called "one of the best media studies books ever published," will be released by Harmony Books in the fall of 1998. As a freelance writer, Davis has contributed articles and essays to Wired, Gnosis, 21C, Spin, Mediamatic, Lingua Franca, Magickal Blend, The Nation, Parabola, Green Egg, Details, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice, where he has written extensively about television, technology, music, philosophy, and the subcultural landscape. Two of his Voice features--concerning the future of television and Klingon Star Trek fans--were reprinted in the Utne Reader, and a number of his articles have been translated for publication in countries ranging from Japan to Brazil to Hungary. His essay "Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information" appeared in Flame Wars, a collection of articles on cyberculture published by Duke University Press.

Davis has been interviewed by CNN, has appeared on radio shows internationally, and provided a cameo lecture for Craig Baldwin's upcoming film, Specters of the Spectrum. He has lectured internationally at media arts conferences on topics relating to cyberculture, contemporary electronic music, and spirituality in the postmodern world. He is also a contributing editor to the cyberzine Fringeware Review. Some of his work can be accessed at http://www.levity.com/figment, and he can be reached by email at figment@sirius.com.