To me shaman appears to be a messenger from god, a bridge between the community with the bigger spiritual realm that connects through embodiment, through trance state and through the loss of societal and structural consciousness. Yet, through the reading, it’s my first time bridging the connection between technology with shamanism, into a term technoshamanism. It was never an option for me to think of technology as a tool of shamanism. In my very naive and “modern-centric” mind, Shamanism appears rather naturalistic, at least not related to anything that relies on electricity. 

Shaken says in the reading that Technoshamanism “names the messiness of cultural hybridity and the commodification of shamanism tradition.” I felt like the distinction between “technoshamanism” and “shamanism that uses technology” comes from a sense of “realness” and “truthfulness” that you only feel in the body. As Pauline Oliveros says, “the wisdom of the body is crucial to accessing an expanded state of consciousness”.  Whether the bridge is built by the shaman, it should be felt in the state of the bodies. I don;t know if I ever entered a trance state or even if I did whether I would later allow myself to call that a trance state. But as artists, it seems to be the artist’s call to use their tool to draw the bodies that are present under their work into another state that frees them of all the social labels that we constantly carry with us,  and brings individuals into a communal liminal space. 

I really like the quote from Donna Haraway that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, all critters share a common flesh.” It seems like nowadays it’s so easy to disregard this, dispute this and keep on in this individualistic pathway. It seems that we easily guard and break off from the connections based differences we label each other, rather than bridging and having these connections. I hope art could bring the connection back with the metaphors, and the shaman’s power. One thing that I think art could bridge is the ability to like audiences enter another body that holds completely different stories, and I believe in that power, the power that Jack Burhan said as  “a psychic dress-rehearsal for the future”