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DORTMUND, Germany — The inscription on the wall illuminated by soft ultraviolet light says, “Let’s use smartphones and tarot cards to connect with spirits.” “Let’s build do-it-yourself devices to listen to invisible worlds.”

The spells printed as wallpaper are part of the “Cyberwitches Manifesto” by French artist Lucile Olympe Haute. A show called “Technoshamanism”” at that time Hartware MedienKunstVerein In Dortmund, Germany until 6 March 2022. Bringing together the works of 12 artists and collectives, the group exhibition explores the connections between technology and esoteric, ancestral belief systems.

In our lives that are always online, the supernatural is having a high-tech moment. All over our spirituality feeds: The self-help guru Deepak Chopra built his own NFT platform, witches Reading tarot on TikTok, and AI-driven astrology app Co-Star It has been downloaded more than 20 million times.

D., assistant professor of faith and digital ethnography at Penn State Harrisburg. Jeffrey A. Tolbert has an explanation. “Because of the globalization potential of the internet, people are able to access faith traditions that they couldn’t easily access before,” he said. A growing number of people in the United States describe themselves as “spiritual,” but not “religious,” he added, adding that the internet allows these people to explore, choose, and combine the spiritual traditions that appeal to them most..

Inke Arns, the curator of “Technoshamanism”, said that during the last tour of the exhibition, contemporary artists also noticed the widespread presence of esoteric spirituality in the digital space. “I asked myself, ‘How is it that in different parts of the world there is this strange interest in not only reviving ancestral knowledge, but also combining it with technology?’ I was asking,” he said.

For artists, the answer often comes down to environmental concern, Arns said. “People are aware that we are in a very dire situation because of the burning of coal and fossil fuels,” he added. And it doesn’t stop.” Old belief systems that are more in tune with nature, combined with new technology, provide artists with a sense of hope in facing the climate crisis, she said.

While technological progress is often seen as damaging to the environment, artists, Indigenous activists and hackers have been trying to reclaim the technology for their own esoteric purposes, said Fabiane Borges, a Brazilian researcher and member of a network called Tecnoxamanismo. This collective organizes meetings and festivals where participants use devices, including do-it-yourself hacked robots, to connect with ancestral belief systems and the natural world.

At the Dortmund show, a sense of hope shines through in the few works that imagine a future for humans beyond Earth. Fifty prints from British artist Suzanne Treister’s “Technoshamanic Systems: New Cosmological Models for Survival” series fill one wall of the museum, imagining spiritual possibilities for the survival of our species.

Treister’s neat, colorful work on paper includes flying saucers and stars laid out in a Kabbalah tree of life diagram, and plans for imaginary scientific systems and extraterrestrial architecture. While billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos looked to space as the next frontier of human expansion, Treister envisioned a utopian alternative: space exploration as a process in which rituals and visions play as many roles as solar power and artificial intelligence.

Arns said that many esoteric practices connect communities to a higher power, and that is why outer space is involved in many contemporary artists’ explorations of spirituality. “It establishes a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm,” he added, creating “the idea of ​​a world that does not just include Earth.”

Technologists have of course found a more digital way to enter new worlds: virtual reality. Many of VR’s founders were interested in psychedelic experiences, a common feature of shamanic rituals. (Lately boom in ayahuasca ceremonies, where participants drank a psychoactive beer, suggesting that the attraction is still strong.) Researchers at the University of Sussex in England, even used VR to try to replicate a magic mushroom hallucination.

At the “Technoshamanism” exhibition in Dortmund, several works present strange images to the audience. Morehshin Allahyari’s VR work “Seeing the Unknown” summons an sinister female genie; At the artist’s request, the VR headset is worn lying in the dark area so that the malevolent spirit hovers over the viewer menacingly. Another work, experienced with augmented reality glasses, leads the viewer into a meditative ritual in a huge papier-mâché temple and weaves a spiral path of light with video holograms.

Instead of inventing their own virtual spiritual sites, other artists try to uncover the lost meaning of some that already exist. For example, Tabita Rezaire, who describes it on her website as “a tool of infinity healing”, shows a film installation exploring megalithic stone circles in The Gambia and Senegal. In a movie played on the flat-screen television on the museum floor, Rezaire explores the true purpose of ancient sites through documentary interviews with local guards, as well as astronomers and archaeologists. Drawing on traditional African understanding of numerology, astrology and the cosmos, the interviews are overlaid with hypnotic CGI visualizations of outer space.

Researcher Borges said technology and spirituality can come together to preserve ancient cultural practices that might otherwise be lost. He recalled that at the 2016 festival organized by his network in Bahia, Brazil, young people with cell phones recorded a full moon ritual performed by members of an Indigenous community, Pataxó. Images showing the Pataxó people speaking their ancient language in trance were then forwarded to local university researchers working to expand a dictionary, Borges said.

Interactions between new tools and esoteric practices can be seen in any mystical practice, said Tolbert of Penn State. “Technology has always been a part of spirituality,” he said, referring to psychic mediums that host their own Facebook groups and ghost hunters using electromagnetic field detectors. “Most of them, I think, don’t see it as representing any conflict,” he added.

So perhaps, as the “Cyberwitches Manifesto” suggests, there is more common ground than expected between hackers and witches, programmers and psychics. As Tolbert put it: “What is technology if not a way for a single person to uncover the answers?”