everyone you ready for your minds to be defiled my name is mike thompson i'm a writer and editor here in new york and i will be your moderator for fiction fantasy and fa h as you can read from the program we're going to be looking at all the different ways that mysticism magic faith superstition divinity all these sorts of things stay with us and sort of  monahan on a raid wave to your audience stephanie is a writer illustrator and youth culture researcher for mtv her work focuses on horror films haunting and cultural memory she's part of the film collective behind spectacle theatre in brooklyn which you should definitely go to if you haven't already it's a great space next is dave evans i'll say hi to everyone dave dave is an artist and researcher based in liverpool he makes wireless local area networks as art and writes about contemporary self denial which is a good metaphor for our power point issues so far he's also a phd candidate individual cultures at goldsmiths university of london next is julianne hannah julia was born in vancouver and is currently an assistant professor at madeira interactive technologies institute in portugal he is writing on literature and technology often appears in academic journals his creative essays can be found in the atlantic barrois minor literature's three a m and be back at your rising the web my name is stephanie and my presentation is called don't go over there adolescent legend tripping goes online so to start i wanted to share this photo that i took about two summers ago when i was visiting a friend in athens ohio are there any people from ohio in the room oh my okay so you know that ohio is like a like a lovely haunted place like very very fun in haunted um so this is the moonville tunnel in vinton county in the southeastern part of ohio and it's an abandoned railroad tunnel that used to house an active line until about one thousand nine hundred and eighty five so the tracks aren't even there anymore and most of the town moonville isn't there anymore either it's a former mining community which is never very large to begin with but the coal industry in ohio has been on decline for decades and all that really remains in moonville are a few foundational structures cemetery and this tunnel which is very haunted so there's a few really good ghost stories associated with it and it makes sense because enough people did actually die from being hit by a train when walking through the tunnel it's kind of deceptively long and takes a long time to walk through it so people would get stuck in there with the train so what you do is young people will go there and build a fire as the sun is setting and rose some hot dogs and have some beers and by the time it's totally dark and only your fire is lit you should be able to see the the light of a railroad inspectors lamp deep in the tunnel as he attempts to find his way to the other side so i want to share this not only because i think the photo is cool which i think is very cool and the tunnel is cool  but i think this is a good example of what one would consider traditional legend tripping so a legend tripping is um if you don't know what it is it's a term used by lots of ax and through anthropologists and folklorists to describe the practice of venturing to a site where h event or haunting is taking place and it's usually to denote an adolescent rite of passage in terms of how it functions socially but i don't think it needs to just be adolescence something it does require in order to make it legend tripping some form of performative participation usually in the form of sharing a story or a legend associated with the place on the way to get people in the headspace for a scary time sometimes it's leaving material items at the site and nick it can often be a form of delinquent behavior like graffiti or just hanging out and drinking beer another important characteristic to keep in mind is that legend tripping is not tourism its defined its defined by another delinquent activity which is illegally trespassing so ultimately it's something that you do alone with a few friends and do not pay money to see which differentiate is argued for a positive aspects of legend tripping mostly regarding how the practice is a way for youth to experiment with testing boundaries in a mostly safe way engaging a storytelling in folklore in the same way that we've done forever so i however will go further and claim that legend tripping is potential value comes from how the practice becomes a way in which many youth encounter alternative histories cultural memory and the porous boundary between physical space and ideology for even a limited moment i am legend trippin forces the people doing it into a confrontation with their own folklore and with this in mind as no surprise that legend tripping is considered a very american practice so the more dreamy a cultish nature of the feeling and mindset that participants are likely to tap into a legend tripping creates a sense of the enduring ephemeral ephemeral that there was a rupture in time and that eerie and he said that haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenize ation of time and space it happens when a place sustained by time or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time he was talking about the film the shining but i think it applies here you know the tripping aspect of legend tripping comes from the effective impact the experience has some participants experiencing a legend through performances the power to charge a place with meaning and it becomes a space in a more phenomenological sense one that connects you to history and others who have come into contact with it before you in other words legend tripping creates incorporeal social networks by participating legend tripping one engages in an open source s community project for parts of a legend were constructed by community members approved or edited by other community members each with his own tradition and influence and the content lives or dies depending on whether or not community members continue to share it it is in this way that although legend tripping was previously conceptualized as a practice firmly rooted in geographic place it found not only a home online but an opportunity to be pushed further in more radical places for good  their events and parties of the existence of spirits by capturing evidence of them usually in the form of parlor tricks but they utilized and manipulated emerging technologies at the time like the telegraph the phonograph and most notably the camera in order to do so and people would go absolutely wild and  in the in terms of new media and digital technologies there's a conception that people may engage less with their physical surroundings and that young people may turn away from legend tripping as a time passing activity because they have the internet but i push back on this because if anything the internet has only enabled more legend tripping t embodied spaces by preserving legends that may have died out if solely reliant on in person oral tradition and there's been so much creativity and invention and legend creation online kinsella who i just brought up now has also written extensively about ons hat that has anyone ever heard of this online legend game open source game well it's a collection of online stories written by four friends that was uploaded to the well that social networking site that start in the late s and the story is nuts it's basically like a multi threaded open ended narrative that's an alternative history of parallel dimensions and chaos science and it kind of sat on ads as an online document dormant for a long time before and being discovered again by a wider community in the late s and everyone added on to it it became a widespread immersive legend trip that happened online and some really interesting elements made it a perfect legend tripping story like the forums they were written in could be served as a magical tool and there was all this stuff written about on how you could basically like you use your computer another dimension that they read about and then a a more modern example i'm sure you've heard of a slenderman it's been in been in the news the past few years so on june th two thousand and nine a forum user on something awful created a challenge getting  then this other photo you can see kind of slender man with more like lovecraftian tentacles in the background kind of a similar thing where he he created this um this narrative behind it saying that this was a recovered photograph from a library fire it was notable for being taken the day where fourteen literally one week later the marble hornets youtube channel was made and there's still like over five hundred zero subscribers at these shaky cam like found footage slender man videos and all of this came together to kind of create these different spaces as sites legend tripping that replaced geographic place and many have noticed that slender man's creation resembles open source software that is persona legend is similarly based a modification and and sharing and transparency of infrastructure in these kind of a hybrid of more traditional folklore and open source pure production but that brings us to a complicated aspect of legend tripping on line because the platforms in which slenderman created are not public they're owned by corporations and a capitalistic element has been lurking in the background of the stor actually taken their life he capitalized off of it and his video the discovery went viral and his disrespect and imperialist ignorant continued to do so after he removed it because by then it already had become part of the youtube media landscape more broadly so if you were a well known youtuber you comment on his action even to chastise him and you got clicks and meanwhile the historical and cultural context of the forest itself and the efforts of suicide prevention in japan and attempts to d romanticize the physical place and attract less attention to it fell by the wayside th the space the accomplish was not only offensive it ruined what if anything could be referred to as a legend tripping project of bringing people into communication with history and lost voices so i'm not claiming what logan paul was was doing was in an excel fledge and tripping but he took a twisted form of what it could look like when capital is injected into the practice to an extreme and gave it a global platform so i just want to leave with um this quote from a wendy hee kong chun who wrote a great piece on the enduring ephemeral in computer technology and she talks about the enduring ephemeral digital media and i think it's worth keeping with us while we're thinking about haunting and digital spaces and how it's not as different from era body experience of haunting as we might think and what a practice like legend tripping accomplishes she writes an information is dynamic however not only because it must move in space but also more importantly because degeneration not regeneration makes memory possible while simultaneously threatening it if our machines memories are more permanent if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack it is because they're constantly refreshed presentation of choice and the opportunity for individual decision are key to this total free market approach so a mechanism was required that could offer choice across the whole range of human activities in any region across all ages and and fiction because if you read the communist manifesto starts with a ghost story right spectre is haunting europe okay so now i'm gonna talk about something else   you might see this one this one's pretty pretty common it has the shocking violence i'll cut the smile off your face but it sort of got a seemingly straightforward message  guns on a t shirt at least not in new york you get amazing sensations from guns you get results from guns and so on so then you start to see that of course the inflammatory essays aren't manifestos their manifesto art or nine she said i tried to figure out what kind of form would be uneasy and hot i love that uneasy and hot and i went to the manifesto i wanted to include both sides of manifesto making one being the scary side where it's an inflamed rant to no good end and then the positive side when it's the most deeply felt description of how the world should be which is a great description of the two things in a manifesto can be i think so even stripped of their frustrated by the limits of polite language they reach beyond measured words to make that their target feel their point and to kind of make it hurt for the person they're aiming at or their whatever they're aiming at in quarry doctor oz first novel down and out in the magic kingdom death is i remember death has been cured so you can kill someone just to make a point as a kind of rhetorical flourish this seems like a suitable analogy if somewhat offhand governance not unlike social media and i see the manifesto as providing both a model as a public direct critical voice and a warning prone to all the traps of fake news propaganda dumbing down false claims on authority is as it was a century ago one of the most exciting written forms from acceleration ism to post capitalism and tifa to black lives matter me to not surprise never again movements and collectives are using manifestos to proclaim themselves to the world today manifestos exist in a transnational space liberated often from the confines of the state but still engaged with situated situated issues and concerns but i remember when they weren't cool  so the turning point was kind of two thousand and eight a year that's been coming up a lot in the last two days i think the rise of social media obviously the financial crisis also quite obviously and over the next few years with occupy and grassman grassroots political movements responding to the crisis in europe i think i was standing behind the photographer in the bottom picture because i remember that very well but that's in the kind of dark times of the financial crisis in europe obviously recent elections radical impact and populist politics have returned to sender stage and never more so than today fifty years on  years ago art and activism of course don't have to be comfortable but you have to ask what purpose of violence serves on a more serious note as the norwegian mass murderer anders bre action their manifesto what i thought was interesting was they declared that it was quote an inseparable echo of our incendiary act so they're really clearly putting the manifesto together with the act against an institution against be jesse crispin saying my feminism is a cleansing fire or i do pose a threat or it could be sarah ahmed in a recent killjoy manifesto who writes you have to let the violent spill all over the pages but th powerful voice might also be used by a dylan roof or an elliot rodger who's now sadly back in the headlines after toronto and who in the midst of his killing spree stopped post a video a statement on youtube and send out his hundred thousand word in cell manifesto there's definitely something about the length of a manifesto connected to probably back to hitler connecting to its toxicity as a positive the main job of art work called me an email is not to aesthetically please but to disturb and disrupt ideas and principles on the topic of mass shootings he said we can all agree that the recent spate of young white males committing mass shootings is horrific their manifestos are driven by singular ideals and the provocative quality qualities are crude simplistic and entirely devoid of self reflection in contrast he said  ago after she shot warhol and she read my manifesto and it will tell you what i am manifestos are always often literally at the bleeding edge of culture and society in the current decade the manifesto is once again found it's moment is the culture built up by its corporations quote the festivals the meetups memes the manifestos to change these norms they argue requires writing new manifestos manifestos help us to conceive the future pry open new discursive and imaginative spaces to force new ideas like platform co operativism into public view the return of the manifesto short visual often violent at emotional and immune to fact to certainly double edged manifestos hold great potential for positive change but also reflect the dangers that come with extremism and a fragmented populace the return of a form that was so ubiquitous in periods of crisis during the last century is correction in my first slide here it's actually unpopular mysticism that i'm most interested in talking about to give you a little background myself i'm a writer a content producer who works in tech  besides that i'm in jungian psychoanalysis and i practiced the meisner technique with a group of actors so i'm interested in these outmoded practices and techniques and that's why i'm talking about this today popular mysticism and the her generated this on a website called wwe astro comm so from the perspective of someone who who works for tech companies horoscopes are great like every tech company i've ever  like let's do horoscopes even if it almost has no connection to the project so i mean they're they're at best a daily habit at worst a monthly habit and you might even check them daily weekly and  monthly it gets you to give your birthday up which is very important so they know what kind of ads to target to you and who's using their product and i mean there's been a lot of writing about this so i won't talk about it too much but a lot of that horoscopes are are more popular in quote unquote dark times so that during the trump administration a lot of people are turning to to horoscopes also on their eyes is carto it's like a french cartomancy deck so she's like very into this kind of stuff and she's a little more advanced but there's like the commercial artist adam jk recently posted on instagram stories a poll asking should readings and horoscopes elicit this it me feeling that's often talked about gives people a real insight into their their own identity a feeling of security of what may happen in the future both of these practices have forward looking elements to them and there are systems of symbols which makes it easy things have a sort of visual language so they're instagram friendly so the moment we're in now coming off of the cambridge analytic has scandal there's a this kind of staged public discourse an outrage about the amount of data that companies are collecting on us it actually seems that despite all of this outrage people are very easy to give up their information online especially in the case that it might be reflected back to them in the form of like a personality quiz which was a big tool cambridge analytically used so you know if the end result is some self reflection people will give up their data the problem with the problem occurs when what's happening with the data is happening unbeknownst to them or sort of against their will so this is why for tech companies horoscopes and tarot cards are very in like they're they're totally okay with them because they present sort of alternative user profiles that obscure away from the actual user profiles that they have created for all of us using the product that we can't see because there's some we're on the back end  and they're also based on other worlds that are sort of alternatives to our digital world another tool for deflection so here is a picture of eva chen she's an influencer and she works at instagram she does fashion partnerships there and this is an example of like crystals and she's aligning her chakras with the help of some crystals here  other products that are sort of irl products that offer this antidote or panacea to the digital world are like sound baths and and reiki that are very popular now are like tactile practices and they're they're often very profitable when they're commercialized and not happening within communities and they're really a way to increase  sustain internet usage by being able to go offline be healed and rejuvenated and then you go back online and you're sold more crystals another popular form of mysticism that we see is like cast a spell on trump along with a bunch of other witches these i mean you can just see like the the public is pretty comfortable with this mode of talking about things and and i'll argue that you know tech companies sort of make room for this because it allows their users to have a form of agency and because big tech if you will doesn't really give any credence to this they're like okay let them you know sort of have their spells and that's that's fine with us so i do want to talk about some forms of mysticism that haven't taken hold on the internet specifically psychic prediction and  so like straight forward psychic prediction in the form of palm reading or crystal ball has really gone the way of like numerology in that it never has cropped up again it hasn't come back into a fashion  the tech world is very protective of their status as a harbinger of a techno utopian future so i think any legitimate psychic would threaten one whatever it might contradict  musk's future that he's creating for us for example he's very invested in in having all of us believe that we will go to mars and we we will be driving electric cars and and so if we believe that coming from him  chart i don't know if it explains anything to you but it's a term coined by carl jung to express meaningful coincidence so specifically the occurrence of two or more events with an a causal relationship there's sort of undeniably connected so you might be thinking about something or discussing something and simultaneously a physical manifestation  one example that's used is like you ordered a blue dress and it comes and you're like amazon package this is like an old school example but i'll update it so comes on amazon and you you open it and they've accidentally sent you a black dress and moments later you get a call that your grandmother has died and and in that way it's like these two things don't cause each other there's the relationship between them you're just sort of asked to find  a common meaning so for young he sort of created a world a world view to explain how how this might be possible and he proposed that there's a fourth dimension to the triad of classical physics so space time causality and synchronicity he argued and that's sort of his preferred numbers note the number four he sees that as the most balanced perfect unit as opposed to the christian he uses as unis moon this which is a lot in term that can be traced back to the middle ages but it's a it's a unified theory of matter so internal and external there's some sort of absolute truth that's governing all things and they're all coming from the same source and he worked on this with wolfgang pauli the swiss american theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum physics and for young archetypes are an expression of una smoothness and often synchronistic events manifests themselves in this kind of archetypal symbolism and it's all possible because things are all stemming from the same source  very similar almost always the algorithm that we use sort of loosely to talk about how companies target data or target content to us is not transparent so we don't really know the inner workings of it and it's kind of based on this this user profile that we also don't know what what they've collect enough and i scrolled down and directly after it was this post with it has no caption actually it's just um a slideshow of phallic looking vegetables at the grocery store so i was like could this be targeted content is there a way in which like facebook via instagram might be showing me this because they somehow identified what was in the photos and i don't know so i looked into it and i i found out a little bit about facebook's use of computer vision they had a company or they have a platform called lumos which was initially used to improve the experience of visually impaired using the platform so we could describe what was happening in the photos and apparently it's being used now for searches so you can search for what kind of content you want to see and it'll just show you pictures of people running in the mountains or whatever you might search for  this works horribly i can't imagine that it's really working if you've ever tried to search for anything on instagram it's like very hard to do so that just gives a little bit more credence to the fact that these might be synchronistic events happening online and i just have a few like this was one one night there maybe it was just that beats were in season but there were all of these posts about beads that sort of were coming up like more and more rapidly as i engaged with them  that you have it's a meaningful coincidence again it's not just a coincidence so some of these had meaning at the time others less so  and really the only way we're gonna be able to differentiate between synchronistic content and content that's targeted to us is if we know a little bit more about how these algorithms are targeting content to  us and you know i i don't think that we're gonna see tech companies really coming over to the synchronistic side of things because it would mean for them giving up a bit of agency for them to be incorporated into unis mundis and the expressions of messages that aren't that they're not the the arbiters of that would take a lot so i'm i'm not optimistic about it but i do feel like there there are ways in which if we believe that this synchronicity is a force at work that technology is inevitably wrapped up in it and the only downside of that is that we might just be getting more messages about messages that we're about to see so i like yesterday asked so like so what time it was and instead of i don't she must have heard me wrong she started playing  talking to each other and that's sort of the terms for what what is meaningful you get synchronistic events that just sort of speak in this this digital loop so that's the end of my talk things thank you for that that was great so we've got about seven minutes here for questions since we went a little bit long i want to just if anyone has a question in the audience feel free to raise your hand  because i'm in jungian psychoanalysis i have like a room where it's totally fine to be like yes synchronicities this i don't think everyone feels as strongly about that i totally believe that meaningful messages come sort of when they're necessitated and in life and yeah i i just i'm a true believer let's talk more after for sure you just kind of fades away is that as a possibility maybe well i think i think what i'm interested in is is sort of identifying moments where it doesn't seem like that algorithm could could have worked  this at all so i i mean i didn't talk about it much and in my talk but and meaning computer vision is one way specifically with visual images that that's going to become even harder and harder to identify  but but there are moments that seem sort of inexplicable and i think that those will persist and be maybe some kind of saving grace for us i was watching tv yesterday morning and there was a uncertainty around it once you're supposed to throw it's been uncertainty around it anyway right i don't want to be willfully naive like i think that tech companies could say no that that's not happening and it's definitely happening like there's no way that i mean in the sense that that these coincidences are meaningful i think it's it's hard it's a little bit hard to define right because it has to feel meaningful to the person experiencing it like obviously coincidence happens all the time  and i mean i i think that's that's the difference between being a cynic and a believer is thinking oh well you know this happens a million times every day and and if you believe that the world is dictated by this kind of a you know you're being fed like it glimpses into some sort of absolute truth that if you just you opened your eyes and saw that that's sort of the basis of synchronicity right is like oh if you just pay attention to these coincidences and see that they're meaningful you might tune into something that's more some kind of like universal truth if if you don't believe that i think you're gonna going to feel like there's a million  random coincidental things happening okay we've got time for one more if anyone else has one but there's someone in the back  considered that and the thing about the thing that makes the kind of christian asceticism particularly relevant is the degree to which it detail and i saw we had correlation between that and say facebook you know something that's trying to implicate itself in lots of aspects of our lives so yeah you have a very formal system and then you have groups of people who've tried to find ways to operate within their was very formal systems so that's where my interest i me we are out of time i want to thank all of you for coming and listening and being such a gracious audience i want to thank our panelists stephanie dave julien and ashley there's amazing i learned a lot if you want to come chat afterwards we'll be here for a few more minutes the next panel starts at three zero there's been a little bit of a misprint in the schedules if you have them that meal period is at four fifteen you might see it's it was printed underneath the end of this session but it's actually at four zero so we have three to four or fifty and we'll be one more round of panels and then you can eat and then we'll have keynotes at six zero thank you very much