#technoanimism

[stagkingswife]

Hi! I was going through your techonamism tag and I just find your thoughts fascinating. If you feel comfortable doing so, do you have any tips with forming a relationship with a laptop for example? Like, are there any specific exercises that you do? Again only if you feel comfortable sharing that info 🖤

The best advice I can give is to not think of technoanimism as something separate from the rest of your animistic beliefs and practices, assuming you already have such beliefs and practices. The distinct term is great and helpful for conversations and discussions, but I don't think about my beliefs and practices as animism and technoanimism, I just think of it all as just animism. So if you've already successfully established relationships with other animistic spirits you can just do the same thing with technological spirits. Naturally every spirit is unique, but if you've found an approach that works for you it can most likely be applied with some adaptation to most animistic spirits you might encounter. I do have an exercise that I'm writing that teaches my personal method for connecting with any animistic spirit, but that particular exercise is slated to be published as part of a larger project that is just getting started. But if you keep an eye out announcements about that project will be hard to miss on this blog.

[thedigitalhuman]

Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

Stream or download the podcast here Digital Human: Series 18, Ep 1 - Animism

[stagkingswife]

hi! would it be alright to ask you to share a bit about techno-animism? (only what you're comfortable with sharing, of course!) i saw it mentioned in your pinned post and would love to hear more (especially because i started at a tech job recently and would like to incorporate it into my work!) 😊

I'm happy to talk about it! Thanks for your patience, you sent this - which is kind of a big ramblely subject on a week when I had very little time to ramble.

Before I started working a tech job myself I was like many modern pagan animists I've known, I really only thought natural things had spirits. Trees, rocks, natural features, areas of land, etc. Maybe particularly magical inanimate objects had spirits - like divination tools. But at the time I was what I would describe as a "soft animist" meaning what I defined as having a spirit was flexible and malleable, and I wasn't really convinced that everything had a spirit.

Then I started working in tech. It's always been in my nature to talk to myself and the world around me as I puzzle through things. It just makes problem solving easier for me. So when I started working as a desktop support technician I was talking to the computers I was troubleshooting and it felt more like a conversation than I expected. That was sort of the extent of it until I further developed in my career and really started working with a wider variety of hardware that I delved deeper. I started doing the same "getting to know you" exercises that I did with plant, stone, or object spirits to determine their correspondences, or the listening exercises I did to connect with genus loci or nature spirits and focusing those exercises on a server, firewall, switch, workstation, etc. After some practice I found that connecting to the spirits of technological devices was a little different from connecting with the spirit of a tree or a river, but not so different as to be impossible.

I specify that I practice "techno-animism" because that assumption that only natural or "magical" things have spirits and that man-made or more modern thing as spiritually dead is so common. I like to differentiate that when I believe everything has a spirit I mean everything has a spirit. It's just a matter of learning how to talk to it the right way.

[stagkingswife]

Speaking of my stimulator and techno-animism….

Getting my spinal cord stimulator implanted in 2016 was probably one of the biggest steps in cementing techno-animism as part of my practice. I had already been experimenting with the concept and practicing communicating with techno spirits for about seven years. I was comfortable cajoling the spirit of a server into showing me what the problem was to make my troubleshooting easier, or bribing the sprits of a network stack to come back online with offerings. But choosing to form a symbiotic relationship with one Oreo sized computer and battery turned the volume up to eleven so to speak. (“Oreo sized” was my surgeons favorite way to describe the battery pack/computer.)

[anitosoul]

[amcint23]

Nicolas Bourriaud – Art in the Anthropocene: Humans, Objects and Translations

Night of Philosophy and Art 28.05.2015 The CCA is pleased to take part in the first Night of Philosophy and Arts in Israel, co-presented by the French Instit...

In the process of working my way through this video

How does the Anthropocene affect the way we, as artists, represent the world?

How are we envisioning the world-to-come?

Post-internet

Trans-humanism

A world without humans

The reversal of a proposition is important in order to understand the proposition

Machines & animals

Techno-animism

[consortianet]

Daria Martin's "Soft Materials" was shot in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich where scientists research "embodied artificial intelligence." Rather than being programmed from the head down by a computer brain, embodied AI instead learn to function through the experience of their physical bodies. Embodied AI are an extension of the belief that many features of human cognition are shaped by aspects of the body beyond the brain. Filed under: #technoanimism

[americansatori]

(via A Sci-Fi Short Film HD: "THE SHAMAN" - by Marco Kalantari - YouTube)

Very well done short. Great production values, smart take on technanimism.  Do machines have souls, could shaman reach them at a level of conscience? or power them into compliance?