Reading this, what struck me most wasn’t the art or the technology. It was the loneliness embedded in the premise. Shanken is essentially arguing that modern people are so cut off from themselves and each other that we need elaborate workarounds: VR headsets, ayahuasca ceremonies, multimedia installations, just to feel what a Yanomami community apparently felt on an ordinary Tuesday. There’s something almost embarrassing about that, in the best possible way. We’ve built so much, and yet here are serious academics and artists essentially reverse-engineering awe.

What I keep thinking about is Pauline Oliveros describing music moving through her, like she was just the instrument. That’s not a new idea. Monks have said it, jazz musicians have said it, athletes call it flow. The technoshamanism framing just gives it a gallery wall and a footnote. Maybe that’s the real point though. Not that the technology gets us somewhere ancient and sacred, but that naming it, framing it, putting it in a Venice Biennale pavilion, is how a secular culture gives itself permission to want transcendence without apologizing for it.