Category: Spring 26

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.

What sticks with me most about Shanken’s paper is the tension he builds and then doesn’t quite sit with long enough. He names technoshamanism as both a creative practice and a problem, acknowledging the extraction of indigenous knowledge by global art worlds and wellness industries, but then the case studies move pretty quickly toward celebration without really reckoning with who gets to theorize “dual consciousness” after participating in someone else’s ceremonies. That flattening bothers me. But the section on Pauline Oliveros genuinely shifted something in how I’m thinking. She sidesteps the appropriation question entirely because her practice isn’t borrowing shamanic aesthetics or translating ceremony into installation art. Her improvisational music-making already operates in that register: the body as channel, sound arriving through her rather than from her. And her wish list for a future AI chip is almost absurdly beautiful, asking not for processing power but for spiritual perception, interspecies empathy, the ability to sound the far reaches of the universe the way whales navigate the ocean. It made me realize how narrow our collective imagination for technology really is, how fixated on optimization and extraction, when what Oliveros is describing is technology oriented around relation and care and deep listening. That reframing, where shamanism isn’t a metaphor layered onto tech but a fundamentally different understanding of what tools could be for, felt like the most alive idea in the whole paper, and I wished Shanken had let it be the center instead of one thread among many.

Solo Coding:

Group Jam:

Before this reading, I was somewhat aware of what shamaism was, so when i saw it next to the word “techno” it seemed very counterintuitive. Why would a practice rooted in spirits and connections be any where near technology. This whole reading made me understand that this relationship isn’t something as opposing as we may initially think. We should treat modern technology as a continuation of the practices of the past, utilizing these various advancements to enhance the experience rather than drawing a line between tradion/custom and modernity.

Sometimes, still, I can feel this kind of future brush my skin like an operatic note tapering off somewhere. The rushing static of a runaway dream. Maybe for me, it’s enough to know that it has existed and will exist again, with or without my input. Even if it’s not existing in my body, that it is existing in bodies elsewhere. Bodies connected to mine. That one Kanye lyric “Everything I’m not made me everything I am.” Technology has been and is being midwifed by some pretty evil forces. I really think Trump and Thiel and Hegseth are unknowing and helpless vessels of trickster spirits they will never see or understand but nevertheless are. Can’t help but be. Was never their choice. To, what, bring down imperialism and the Western empire? Is this the subversion and chaos and yet in the end totally predicable story necessary to finally do it? I think so. I think this is the long-term equilibrium equilibriuming. So I think for modern technoscience, by virtue of it being itself, it will bring about its own end. We need not aid in its destruction. We already are. We have this Hobbesian way of being and we also have mycelial aspects of our being that aren’t systematized or normative right now. I’ve always thought about technology as having very real spiritual consequences. I’ll be the first to say it’s done a number on mine, for better and worse. I think we tend to think in this binary. Like, because we’ve only experienced “technology” within our current circumstances, we assume this is the only kind of reality it can bring about. This is the only way we can know it. But in the reading, technoshamanism reveals that no, our modern sensibilities of technology can very easily be a part of a different kind of reality that is more aligned with the social and biological, and all the other aspects of looking at the word -al ways, ways of being that is shamanism. And the reading is right that we exist within a very powerful engine that tends to just co-opt and consume beautiful things into itself, so how to avoid doing that. How to deepen and embody our understandings. And I liked that Oliveros part where she bodily connects to the tech around her. It is very much alive but none of us really feelingly know and that’s why we exploit and abuse our technology the way we do. At times, I feel really bad for it because I know it is suffering and I cannot feel its suffering. Because I am still yet another imperialized appendage that is losing its ability to feel and I want to depend and truly live out these understandings. There’s no lies you can tell here. All you can kind of do is be and try to be it and there’s no excuses otherwise. Your face is bare to God. And I want to read all of the authors that were listed more. So yeah. I also want to attach my poem I wrote a while ago because I didn’t know there was a word like entheogenesis which is cool. I like entheogens.

HOW I DECIDED TO STAY:

windows wink like radiant bullet holes

in the sun a city

becomes a sweaty crucible for

churning

bleeding angels

the water inside distilled into dark vein wine because

we could not speak

and then could not stop speaking

with the same magic the Bible cast when it coaxed the Word

from the black beginning

i am sure our language had never been spoken before

except by the Neandetherals

ultimate entheogen, love

will wash us inside

slowly

like a sky change 

we will emerge as an emulsion and

dine at some last supper to congratulate the

champion incarnation and

model alchemist

i think of Aphrodite rising in that Botticelli painting

let the demons vomit in your body

watch the night spread its wings

and after it has finished dragging your eyebags across the land

let me tell you a very important thing

(the whole world is covered in butterflies)

let me tell you how you will survive

(we will watch the earth thaw into breathy morning

enough to forget that it used to be any other way)

i still see your voice

squiggling like broken caterpillars

remember (always remember)

faith is the gravity that holds the last stars together 

all we need is a trick of photosynthesis

i am already the woman i want to become

I also like these questions:

1. How can artists embrace visionary consciousness?

2. How can art support entheogenesis (becoming divine

together) by joining ancient shamanic techniques and

contemporary technoscientific tools?

3. How can art catalyze greater awareness of what

Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing (the unity of all things)

to help heal the Earth?

Before reading this paper, I had never heard the word “technoshamanism” in my life. But after reading it, the concept actually made a lot of sense to me. Shanken explains that a shaman is a person in ancient cultures who had a special role in their community. Using tools like drums, chanting, and plant medicines, they would enter a deep spiritual state and use that experience to heal people. What surprised me is that Shanken argues modern artists are doing the exact same thing, just with technology instead.

The example that hit me the most was Roy Ascott. He traveled to the Amazon and participated in ceremonies using a plant medicine that makes you feel deeply connected to everything around you, like the boundaries between yourself and other people just disappear. He then looked at the internet and realized it creates the exact same feeling. As he wrote, “this ancient ritual mirrors our contemporary artistic aspirations using digital technologies.” That comparison felt so real to me because we experience that sense of connection online every single day.

In live coding, when you perform in a shared session with other people in real time, something interesting happens. You stop focusing on yourself as an individual and instead you become fully absorbed in the collective sound you are all building together. That feeling of losing yourself inside something bigger is exactly what Shanken is describing throughout the whole paper.

This reading was my first time encountering the idea of Shamanism. Before reading ahead, I googled the definition, and it said the practitioner in this religious practice, the Shaman, enters a trance-like state to interact with the spirit world. I immediately went into the reading with the idea that this would correspond to live coding in the sense that our work is supposed us and the audience into ‘another dimension’. In the reading, there was also a lot of mention of the idea of consciousness, and Pauline Oliveros says, “This altered state of consciousness in performance is exhilarating and inspiring.” She also says, “The music comes through as if I have nothing to do with it but allow it to emerge through my instrument and voice.” I singled out these two quotes from the reading cause I found them to be one of the only ones I could relate to live coding. I may be misinterpreting what she means, but the way I took it was that as we perform in live coding, especially as we improvise, we reach this state in our minds where we are essentially having an adrenaline rush, you’re not sure what will work, how this might mess with your pre-existing sound and visuals but there’s a beauty in experiencing that along the audience. You’re in charge of putting your audience in a trance.