Author: Yutong Tang

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”

When coding live, I’ve always felt scared when writing code live. Partly because I am not really skilled and familiar with the code, but also it’s a sense of exposure that I felt greatly uneasy about. Through the reading tho, I’m struck by the sentence that says how the reveal of the immediacy of decision making makes the audience feel the liveliness of a music and the process of creation. Like how Bailey and Deadmau5 differentiate their view of what liveliness is, it occurs to me that “live” is not merely about being present, being there, but it’s the sense that something can go unexpected at any moment, and accidents can be further developed. 

Like what Bailey says, “[the] accidental can be exploited through the amount of control exercised over the instrument, from complete – producing exactly what the player dictates – to none at all – letting the instrument have its say” (italics our own) (Bailey 1993, 100). Instruments are treated as having an agency in the making of music, where we exploit the elements that are not predefined by us humans. This became paradoxical when it comes to computers, as computers themselves run in processors, code and each element follows the structure that is artificially defined, but it is the timely “unstructured” practices that brings it to life. The author says that live coding “allows for the demonstrations of instrumental virtuosity” by showing the screen, it erases the assumption we have of computers as everything is structured and hidden. 

Personally, I find it interesting to see the balance between the composition and the liveliness of live coding. As the author says that a live coding performance has set composition like a pre-performance that are used for compositional purposes. Yet, to avoid live coding becoming mediatized as simply a press of the play button, or control enter to run the code one by one like what I would do in the past, I realize the importance of being at the spot and allowing accidents to happen. Yet, to become a “skilled” live coder, the understanding of composition and familiarity is what needs to be further developed.