Missing Witches - October 28, 2018


Missing Witches - Brenda Laurel： ＂Unleash The Alchemical Power Of It All.＂

Topics
techno-pagan Brenda Laurel witchcraft and technology
Part 2 Missing Witches： Witches Found - Goddess With Phoenix Missing Witches： Witches Found - Samhain with Reeta and Phoenix

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

162.91

Word count

3,950

Sentence count

230

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 As podcasting witches, we find our people on the Instagrams and in Facebook groups.
00:00:07.040 We are lovers of forests and lakes and cityscapes, ukuleles and wah-wah pedals,
00:00:13.940 digital and analog, and these tiny supercomputers we get to carry around with us all the time.
00:00:19.660 So we wanted to find a techno-pagan to bridge the gap and maybe question if the gap exists at all.
00:00:25.020 A cyber witch to round out our first season of Missing Witches 0.98
00:00:29.200 and remind us that the word technology at its root means science of craft. 1.00
00:00:34.980 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:37.760 Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:41.300 You must be a witch. 0.94
00:00:43.140 Maybe like me, the term techno-pagan makes you picture Willow from Buffy 0.67
00:00:47.100 flying past firewalls to dig deep in archives,
00:00:51.040 her black eyes crackling in CD-ROMs at the ready. 0.98
00:00:55.020 Writing and representations about techno-pagans offer good clues about what the early internet 0.88
00:00:59.460 meant to a witch, stretching her powers out into the gender-fluid, world-making possibilities
00:01:05.180 of those secret codes.
00:01:07.240 But as much as Willow is my life goals, we wanted to find someone real, and if possible
00:01:12.640 a witch who bridged the cyber-witch worlds of then, CD-ROMs and MUDs and WYSIWYG, and
00:01:18.720 now, a new wave techno-pagan playing with the exponentially empowered tools of today.
00:01:25.020 And after falling down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia and Googling and links in blogs, 1.00
00:01:29.560 we found a woman who synchronized witchcraft and technology
00:01:32.620 to pioneer the magical landscape of virtual reality, Brenda Laurel. 0.94
00:01:38.320 She pops up in a 1995 article from Wired titled simply and helpfully Technopagans.
00:01:45.720 Today in the silicon crucible of computer culture,
00:01:49.120 digital denizens are once again building bridges between logic and fantasy, math and myth.
00:01:55.020 the inner and the outer worlds.
00:01:57.580 Techno-pagans, for all their new-age kitsch and bohemian brouhaha,
00:02:01.320 are taking the spiritual potential of this postmodern fusion seriously.
00:02:05.980 As VR designer Brenda Laurel put it in an email interview,
00:02:09.780 pagan spirituality on the net combines the decentralizing force
00:02:13.680 that characterizes the current stage in human development,
00:02:17.300 the revitalizing power of spiritual practice,
00:02:21.380 and the evolutionary potential of technology.
00:02:23.940 revitalizing our use of technology through spiritual practice is an excellent way to
00:02:29.320 create more of those evolutionary contexts and to unleash the alchemical power of it all
00:02:35.940 brenda laurel's game company purple moon directed at girls among the very first to recognize this
00:02:43.080 part of humanity online telling stories of girls in the forest linked with magic and the moon and
00:02:49.700 her writing about Gaia and theater. She uses Renaissance fairs as examples of fractal interactivity
00:02:55.960 that could be applied to distributed computing games, and her groundbreaking research turning
00:03:00.940 virtual reality into a tool for flight brings the goddess into the heart of the machine. 0.98
00:03:06.480 She is a Trojan horse full of theater nerds and solstice rituals aimed right at the heart 0.60
00:03:11.180 of contemporary capitalism, video games, war games, the vast copy-pasting of war. 0.95
00:03:17.440 over the course of her career she goes from revolutionizing the understanding of power
00:03:22.680 and the performance of power and agency in the computerized world and in the web spider woman
00:03:28.040 to advocating for activism from within the machine to conjuring a new emergent state of animist design
00:03:35.360 to radically awaken humanity's perception of ourselves as Gaia's eyes i think you'll agree
00:03:42.120 the witch is strong with this one brenda laurel's phd thesis turned book computers as theater
00:03:49.060 became and remains a syllabus staple in the field of interface design and beyond
00:03:53.640 for the record we tried to reach out to her but she's a busy badass and we didn't hear back
00:03:58.720 if somehow this gets to your earbuds brenda laurel just know that these hippie techno
00:04:03.960 witch podcasters out in the woods north of montreal would love to sit crooked and talk
00:04:09.040 straight with you, as they say. The intro to computers as theater begins with a quote.
00:04:14.860 Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control of the artists. Similarly, computers
00:04:21.260 flourished as the engineers lost control of the activists, the home brew clubs, the artists,
00:04:26.840 and the visionaries, and yes, there's still more control to be wrested away, and still more
00:04:32.160 flourishing required. When Laurel writes this book in 1991, she sees more clearly than most
00:04:38.220 that the power and magic of this new machine is trapped behind a door with no knob.
00:04:44.980 She challenges the metaphors of perception and interaction to be better. She writes,
00:04:49.860 there is the overwhelming sense of something being in the way, something standing between
00:04:54.500 us and what we want to do. To advance what's possible, she compares the possibilities and
00:05:00.940 medium of computers not to a transaction machine, but to the common ground of theater,
00:05:05.720 specifically to an activist philosophy of theater
00:05:08.360 where the created world can adapt in conversation with the audience.
00:05:12.620 She describes a new poetics of interactivity.
00:05:17.140 Art is the external representation of things that happen in the head of the artist.
00:05:22.180 Art forms differ in terms of the materials they employ,
00:05:24.940 the way the representations are created,
00:05:27.080 what they purport to represent, and how they are manifest in the world.
00:05:31.040 Different forms have different powers,
00:05:32.880 the powers to engage, to provide pleasure and information, to evoke response, but all have as
00:05:39.040 their end the representation of some internal vista that the artist wishes to create, beyond
00:05:44.120 the bounds of his or her own skull, making it available in some form to other people.
00:05:50.060 What are such representations good for? Aristotle defined catharsis as the end cause of a play and
00:05:56.320 saw it as the pleasurable release of emotion, specifically those emotions evoked by the action
00:06:01.420 represented in the play. In his view, catharsis occurred during the actual runtime of the play,
00:06:06.760 but some contemporary theorists disagree. The early 20th century German dramatist
00:06:11.840 Bertolt Brecht extended the notion of catharsis beyond the temporal boundary of the performance.
00:06:17.560 He posited that catharsis is not complete until the audience members take what they have
00:06:21.280 assimilated from their representation and put it to work in their lives. In Brecht's hypothesis,
00:06:27.740 the representation lives between imagination and reality, serving as a conductor, amplifier,
00:06:34.960 clarifier, and motivator. In episode one of this podcast, in thinking about how Pixie Coleman Smith
00:06:41.420 found a family in the world of the theater under the management of Bram Stoker before she created
00:06:46.800 the most impactful tarot deck the world has seen, we suggested that a lot more should be said about
00:06:52.460 theater and magic, ritual and representation, and the creation of new worlds. The way techno-pagans
00:06:58.740 like Laurel talk about theater and cyber-reality stretches that question even further. From that
00:07:04.240 Wired article, a startling number of pagans work and play in technical fields as sys-ops,
00:07:10.720 computer programmers, and network engineers. On the surface, techno-pagans embody quite a
00:07:15.840 contradiction. They are Dionysian nature worshipers who embrace the Apollonian artifice
00:07:21.780 of logical machines. But pagans are also magic users, and they know that the Western magical
00:07:28.880 tradition has more to give a wired world than the occasional product name or the background
00:07:33.760 material for yet another hack and slash game. Magic is the science of the imagination, the art
00:07:40.200 of engineering consciousness, and discovering the virtual forces that connect the body mind with the
00:07:46.160 physical world. And techno-pagans suspect that these occult old ways can provide some handy
00:07:51.780 tools and tactics in our dizzying digital environment of intelligent agents, visual
00:07:57.180 databases, and online muds and moos. One cyberpagan quoted in the Wired article says,
00:08:04.280 both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination.
00:08:10.140 Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs.
00:08:16.160 Creating cyber and virtual realities makes new worlds chimeric possibilities, reveals worlds
00:08:23.340 within worlds. Art makes an internal world external to change another person. Activism aims to make
00:08:29.860 the world as it is anew, end slaveries, save the ecosystem, make right injustices. And we think
00:08:37.160 witchcraft is of the same stuff. Work we do to heal our traumas and to make, find, and recover
00:08:43.080 worlds within worlds. In a commencement address at California State University at Monterey Bay
00:08:49.380 in May 2000, Brenda Laurel describes how the world can change so much in one lifetime. It is
00:08:56.000 undeniably magic. And she makes a case for activism from inside the mainstream.
00:09:01.180 I went to an all-white suburban high school in Indianapolis, she says. All hell was breaking
00:09:06.020 loose in Southeast Asia, but in the Indiana burbs, it was still Pleasantville. None of our 0.99
00:09:10.120 classmates had gone to Vietnam yet, and the war was not a topic of dinner conversation.
00:09:14.660 Unpleasant thoughts were not expressed. So in 1968, instead of speaking about the war at
00:09:19.780 graduation as any self-respecting 60s liberal would have done, I gave what seemed to me a
00:09:24.420 very enlightened talk about the poetry of Khalil Gibran. Sweet. My college speech four years later
00:09:31.120 wasn't so sweet. The campus boiled with political conflict over the war, students' rights, and civil
00:09:36.260 rights. Out of a student body of 1,200, there were exactly nine black students that year.
00:09:42.280 I worked with African American Student Union to propose a new admissions program.
00:09:46.580 I knocked on the doors of Hoosier farmers and housewives to talk about ending the war. I had
00:09:52.440 more than one shotgun pointed at me. Rowdy boys shouting anti-war slogans were shot in the knees 0.83
00:09:58.320 by local cops. The philosophy department taught an unauthorized course in cultural revolution.
00:10:03.600 The student senate voted to boycott grapes.
00:10:07.700 Anti-war agitprop was performed on campus green.
00:10:11.160 The ROTC building was torched.
00:10:14.220 The authorities retaliated with a crackdown on liberalism.
00:10:18.580 They gelded the student government and let go of literally every non-tenured liberal faculty member.
00:10:24.200 Their excuse was that the money from those faculty salaries was needed to upgrade the campus streetlights.
00:10:30.720 At graduation, I talked about the political war that was going on inside my university
00:10:34.380 and how it reflected the political war that was going on in our society as a whole.
00:10:38.980 I broke the rules. I expressed unpleasant thoughts.
00:10:41.940 I questioned authority and called for a new vision of community.
00:10:46.060 The students cheered. The faculty broke ranks.
00:10:48.660 The dean refused to hand me my diploma, and my mother cried.
00:10:52.900 Fast forward 28 years.
00:10:54.560 Now imagine, if you will, how CSUMB looks to me.
00:10:58.660 You are impossible.
00:10:59.780 but here you are. In 1972, authoritative white men sneered that ideas like those in CSUMB's
00:11:07.580 vision statement were dope-smoking daydreams. A university devoted to diversity committed to
00:11:13.780 establishing a multicultural, multilingual community. A student and society-centered
00:11:18.420 curriculum. A mission not to silence diverse voices but to amplify them through cultural
00:11:23.960 respect, technological mastery, social responsibility, and community service. In other words,
00:11:30.340 A university that would prepare students to be effective activists?
00:11:34.160 Impossible.
00:11:35.720 But here you are.
00:11:37.280 Here we are.
00:11:39.700 Regardless of how each of us may fall short,
00:11:41.980 you need to know that from where I sit,
00:11:43.900 your goals and your energy and your successes here
00:11:46.340 are an incandescent source of hope in this dark new millennium.
00:11:51.240 The world has changed.
00:11:52.980 In many ways, as you know, it is not for the better.
00:11:56.980 Violence and greed are trashing economies
00:11:59.100 and destroying lives on every continent.
00:12:02.840 Values and traditions are winking out like endangered species.
00:12:07.020 Landscapes fall to industrial farms and clear-cut logging
00:12:10.280 and big-box stores and lovely new home sites.
00:12:14.780 Icebergs the size of Delaware are breaking off in Antarctica
00:12:17.520 while the empire of greed steadfastly refuses
00:12:20.800 to let concerns over global warming get in the way of economic development.
00:12:25.740 Our hot-dot economy has put conscience on hold
00:12:28.900 in the name of a consumerist rampage that burns out of control like the 50,000-acre fire in Los
00:12:34.460 Alamos devouring everything in its path. America is better at training its children to be good
00:12:39.780 consumers than to be good citizens. A bright young activist doesn't have to look very far
00:12:44.580 to find something to work on. But just as the world has changed, activism has to change.
00:12:49.940 You who are graduating today have an unprecedented opportunity to redefine how it is done.
00:12:55.000 Now I'm going to do what you were probably hoping I wouldn't, and that is to give you some advice.
00:12:58.900 I really can't help it. I'm almost 50 and you're not. Well, most of you aren't. And it is a
00:13:04.860 graduation address. So here's my advice. Don't whine. Don't marginalize yourself. This is activist
00:13:11.640 error number one. You are not an outsider. You are not prowling around the edges of society.
00:13:16.440 You are at the center. You are America's heart and its conscience and its hands.
00:13:21.360 You have a moral duty and a legitimate voice. Be a good communicator. Muddy messaging is activist
00:13:28.160 error number two. What were people thinking at the IMF and World Bank protests in Seattle and
00:13:33.360 Washington, D.C.? Yes, the press reported riots instead of rhetoric, but part of the reason for
00:13:38.480 that is that the activists involved failed to put out a clear message. You have the skills and tools
00:13:43.520 to do that broadly and relentlessly. Use the force of the internet. Be clear and publish. Change
00:13:50.440 things from the inside when you can. Engage in the culture you are trying to shape. It's easy to
00:13:55.520 criticize from the outside, but if you want to make a difference, you can't stay on the sidelines.
00:14:00.320 Sometimes you've got to mud wrestle. If you think you know what an ethical business is, make one.
00:14:05.660 If you think you know what a good government is, get yourself elected. If you think you can make
00:14:11.040 mind-changing art, don't just show it in an obscure alternative gallery. Put it in front of a million
00:14:16.060 people. Somebody makes popular culture. It might as well be you. Live what you believe. Henry David
00:14:22.780 Thoreau put it this way, cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole
00:14:28.080 influence. This means not just who you vote for, but also what you buy, what you eat, where you
00:14:33.940 live, how you raise your children, what you put your hand to. New technologies make it feasible
00:14:39.700 to demand accountability from everyone you deal with. Protect this new power and grow it and make
00:14:44.920 use of it in the way you conduct every aspect of your life. Be ready to get some on you. Standing
00:14:50.540 for something is messy. A lot of you have spent the last 16 years focused on getting good grades
00:14:56.160 and trying to make your family proud, but activists work for change, and change is always unpopular
00:15:01.260 with somebody. Sometimes activists get beat up. Sometimes they go to jail. Sometimes they die.
00:15:09.920 Sometimes they make their mama cry. I hope you won't have to do any of these things, but somebody
00:15:15.080 someday somewhere is going to get mad at you for what you believe. Accept it and know that you are
00:15:20.000 doing your best. That brings me to the most important thing of all. You've gotten your last
00:15:26.300 report card. The rest of your life will not offer you simple external measures of your worth.
00:15:31.580 It's time to bring your judgment of yourself inside your own heart. Speak from your own
00:15:36.720 experience. Honor your own voice. Be your own moral compass. Know your power. Know your power.
00:15:45.580 in some ways monica show who you met in our fourth episode and brenda laurel pose opposite 1.00
00:15:52.400 challenges to how we witch is it actually possible to change a system from the inside
00:15:58.240 or must the witch be activist on the outside on the margins out at the edge of town the good news
00:16:06.160 is witchcraft isn't a cult and there is no one answer beware of anyone who offers you the
00:16:11.700 opportunity to turn your own questioning and thinking off. This is appealing in an exhausting
00:16:17.540 world, but that way lies madness and totalitarianism and empty Kool-Aid cups.
00:16:24.040 Wicca is not the word, it is the work. It is not an easy answer or a single guru. Witchcraft is a 0.56
00:16:31.520 methodology for improvisation, education, evolution, expression of our questions, connection with the
00:16:37.360 vast and the minute realm of answers, healing ourselves and our ecosystems. All these witches
00:16:43.200 we've been missing help us stretch our questions and our vision. At the end of Computers as Theater,
00:16:48.500 Laurel argued, many of us sense the inadequacy of the paradigm that has led us to our current
00:16:53.240 notions of technology, nature, and consciousness. We see relationships between that paradigm and
00:16:59.380 the degradation of our cultures, our habitat, and our individual lives. Running counter to
00:17:04.780 the traditional ethos of computers, virtual reality is a context for exploring how we
00:17:09.420 make ourselves whole within a technological frame. It is a context in which we encounter
00:17:14.540 technology with passion. The primary concern of VR is not construction of a better illusion
00:17:20.640 of the world. It is learning to think better about the world. 20 years later, in a chapter
00:17:26.880 for a book called Researching the Digital Bauhaus, Laurel takes this idea to its most
00:17:31.640 magical place. Here is a long series of samples from that chapter, which I selected to draw out
00:17:37.860 the melody in it that most excites me. Laurel has the whole chapter available on her personal
00:17:42.500 website, tauzero.com, as a PDF, and everyone should go check it out and dig into her stories
00:17:47.600 of Monet and Kepler and designing from nature and within. She writes, I see pervasive computing as
00:17:54.700 an extremely important phase shift in our capabilities, opening up huge new vistas of
00:18:00.340 possibility for design, discovery, experience, and human agency. What does pervasive computing
00:18:06.460 have to do with animism? Essentially, it can become a tool in manifesting what I call
00:18:12.360 designed animism. The goal is fundamentally experiential, but the consequences are profound.
00:18:18.200 Designed animism forms the basis of a poetics for a new world. Animism as a spiritual belief system
00:18:24.800 attributes indwelling spirits to natural objects like trees and rocks in Bali, places as in the
00:18:31.280 Greek notion of genius loci, or architectural or made objects. These spirits may be ancestral or
00:18:38.200 local, protective or representative of a kind of agency within the object of the natural world.
00:18:44.360 What's lovely to me about animism is not so much its philosophical or religious dimensions,
00:18:48.740 but the behaviors and artifacts that are created by people in response to animistic beliefs.
00:18:54.800 In Shinto practice, natural objects are worshipped as sacred spirits.
00:19:00.100 One of the four principal affirmations of Shinto practice is the honor given to the kami,
00:19:05.180 divine spirits that may be found in sacred places such as mountains or springs.
00:19:09.660 You may know them from Princess Mononoke.
00:19:12.260 Again, these beliefs order life for the believer in terms of the behaviors and constructions they inspire.
00:19:19.000 In both Balinese and Shinto examples, these include shrines, prayers, and dances.
00:19:23.880 In biology, there's a strong trend towards the theory
00:19:26.340 that Earth's enormously diverse and interrelated array of beings
00:19:30.040 with its numberless feedback loops functions itself as a kind of organism
00:19:34.240 where individual entities, including ourselves,
00:19:37.680 are parts of a larger organic whole.
00:19:40.100 The idea can be traced from the Lovelock hypothesis and on
00:19:43.240 through the work of contemporary scientists like Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan,
00:19:47.660 but it is also hinted at in several of the works of Aristotle.
00:19:51.560 In a Gaian sense, focusing on the experience of animism in terms of the behaviors it might engender,
00:19:57.440 a healthy dose could do us a lot of good just about now.
00:20:00.620 Designed animism may help us make crucial changes in how we frame the world
00:20:04.380 and how we behave in the face of enormous environmental challenges.
00:20:08.620 Because animism is seated in nature, the design of an animistic life encourages the imagination to construct beauty
00:20:15.700 through projection onto the natural world, just as it invites nature in as an active participant.
00:20:22.320 How might we design new sources of pleasurable experience with the new affordance of ubiquitous
00:20:28.660 or ambient computing? There is a characteristic shape of dramatic experience that exists at
00:20:33.560 various scales of time and granularities of information. I find this provocative. I suspect
00:20:38.760 that beyond the canonical shape itself, the self-similarity at scale is part of what makes
00:20:43.420 drama beautiful or pleasurable, kind of fractal. This shape of experience might apply to forms
00:20:50.720 besides drama as well, for example, rituals. Dramas were in fact rituals in early Greek
00:20:57.040 culture performed by priests of Dionysus for the greater emotional health of the polis.
00:21:02.340 Sensors that gather imagination about wind or solar flares or neutrino showers or bird
00:21:07.860 migrations or tides or processes inside a living being or dynamics of an ecosystem are means by
00:21:14.060 which designers can invite nature into collaboration and the invisible patterns they capture can be
00:21:19.480 brought into the realm of our senses in myriad new ways. I am not so concerned with the attribution
00:21:25.380 of spiritual powers to beings and processes in the natural world as I am concerned with what
00:21:30.060 those attributions induce in us. When we see the world as deeply alive and beautiful,
00:21:37.060 How does it change us?
00:21:39.080 How does it change what we decide and do in the world? 1.00
00:21:42.880 In my garden, there are fairies.
00:21:44.900 One of my fairies watches the lavender.
00:21:47.700 This one has a history of the flowers and knowledge of how sun and shade move over the garden as the day passes.
00:21:53.280 The lavender fairy brings the scent of warm flowers into my room just at the sunniest hour.
00:21:58.740 It also whispers with the bee fairy, who knows that when the lavender is just so, the bees will come.
00:22:03.500 The water fairies taste the soil around my plants and drip when they are too dry.
00:22:08.100 The lizard fairies dance around the top of my desk when they see the lizards scurry from the Oregon grapes to the woodpile.
00:22:14.660 We see fairies or make them up, but now we can also make them.
00:22:18.420 We have for the first time the capacity to create entities that can sense and act autonomously or with one another or with living beings.
00:22:26.260 They can learn and evolve. They can reveal new patterns, extend our senses, enhance our agency,
00:22:32.860 and change our minds. My fairies watch the sunset with me. They dance the changes in light and
00:22:38.260 temperature, in the closing of certain flowers, in the quieting of songbirds, and the awakening of
00:22:43.140 owls. And I have this perfectly joyful sense that my body is my home, my garden, my canyon, my trees.
00:22:50.900 If I had more sensors, my body could be the earth.
00:22:54.240 With matching effectors, I become a guy and gardener,
00:22:57.260 responsible for and enacting the health of the living planet.
00:23:02.020 I mean, I want this.
00:23:03.780 I know Amy and I sit in our houses in the woods
00:23:06.440 and feel slowly like we are our trees and our stream and our lake.
00:23:12.600 I want to be the guy and gardener.
00:23:14.820 I want to own this as another mode of which,
00:23:17.380 to extend ourselves via emergent properties over a scale made possible by our one organism earth
00:23:25.260 to be in the rhythm of change the pink noise of music to be like water striders taking up the
00:23:32.560 right amount of space on the water with other entities to know our own power and to unleash
00:23:39.820 the alchemical power of it all you must be a witch thanks as always for listening to the
00:23:49.740 missing witches podcast if you want to know more about brenda laurel or any of the witches we've
00:23:54.600 featured on this season of missing witches check out our show notes at missing witches.com
00:23:59.560 this wednesday risa and i get together one more time to talk about technology
00:24:04.740 and witchcraft, and some of the witches that we've found using technology online. Namely,
00:24:10.480 you guys. So thanks again for listening, and blessed be.