This reading honestly made me rethink what I even consider “technology”. I usually think of it as something digital: code, software, devices, but here shamanism is described as a kind of technology too, just one that works through the body, ritual, and consciousness. That shift made me see technology as less about tools and more about methods of accessing and shaping experience.

One idea that really stuck with me is this idea of being in between states – what the reading calls a kind of dual consciousness. When you’re livecoding, you’re writing code in real time, but you’re also reacting to what the system outputs. You’re not fully in control because the code can behave unexpectedly, but you’re also not just observing. You’re in this feedback loop where you’re thinking, feeling, and responding all at once.

That’s where the connection to technoshamanism felt really strong to me. The reading talks about artists becoming a kind of “channel”, especially in the example of Pauline Oliveros, where music flows through her rather than being completely controlled. Livecoding can feel like that too – sometimes you’re not just writing code, you’re kind of listening to it, adjusting to it, almost collaborating with the machine. It becomes less about executing a plan and more about staying present in the moment.

I also think livecoding has a similar performative and even ritual-like aspect. There’s an audience, there’s real-time creation, and there’s always the possibility of failure. But instead of hiding errors, you incorporate them, which feels very similar to the idea of entering altered or expanded states where unpredictability is part of the process. It’s not exactly spiritual in the same way, but there’s definitely a shared emphasis on experience, presence, and transformation. At the same time, the reading made me a bit more aware of the risks of borrowing ideas from shamanism. It’s easy to take concepts like “ritual” or “expanded consciousness” and apply them to digital art in a superficial way. So I think the challenge is how to engage with these ideas meaningfully, without just turning them into aesthetics or metaphors.

Technoshamanism as a concept reminds me heavily of the concept of divine technology and attributing other-worldly or spiritual aspects to tech. In this text Shanken brings the perspective that the artist themselves are the driving, shamanistic forces behind this phenomenon. He also explains that he sees artists specifically in the new media arts (NMA) circles to be more perceptive to this novel idea which makes sense to me as NMA has always existed on the fringe of conventional understanding of the world.

Overall, the call to harness the complete power of technology and art while respecting ancient knowledge of shamanism reminds me of esoteric philosophical enquiries of Land and Fisher early in their career. There seems to be a mystical, almost Lovecraftian reverence attributed to technology which requires shamanistic practices to be ‘understood’ and harnessed.

Throughout the reading, although thought-provoking and enjoyable, I kept wanting to see examples of indigenous artists approaching technoshamanism through their own lived heritage rather than outsiders who had attempted to reinterpret and appreciate indigenous practices in their own ways. There is a mention of Korean artist Kim Jeong Han whose BirdMan is built on traditional Korean and Buddhist idea of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ being similar. However, these are still mainstream understandings of the many thousands of indigenous spiritual philosophies. In fact, Shanken briefly mentions; “Technoshamanism names the messiness of cultural hybridity and the commodification of shamanic traditions”. So there is already a discourse around this part of the movement which makes it even more confusing for me that he chooses not to touch on shaman artists who may provide pushback to this phenomenon later in the text. Maybe he ran out of space.

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”

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.