Triangulating Technology and Magic through Artistic Research

Abstract

Scholars have amply demonstrated that, far from being opposed, magic and technology are often, perhaps always, complementary: technology advances not by overcoming magic, but by incorporating and amplifying it; magic persists not in spite of technological advances, but precisely because such advances inspire and energize it. All of this might rightly lead to questioning whether the conceptual distinctions sometimes drawn between magic and technology (as noted in Ostling’s introduction, 170) are well founded, but we take a different approach. As a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who coteach a seminar/ studio course on magic and technology at MIT (to students who are overwhelmingly engineers and scientists), we view both magic and technology as ways in which the mind extends into the world and the world extends into the mind. As a method of perceiving the mind’s interaction with the physical world, art offers an ideal means for students to study and research the manifold ways magic and technology can mediate human experience. Combining magic and technology through art, we work with students to