Together with Anton Vidokle and Hallie Ayres, I served as Artistic Director of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit (2025). We approached spiritual experience as a formative influence on modern and contemporary art, examining the relationships between technological change, rise of new systems of belief, and following artistic experimentations. Rather than treating technology as culturally neutral, we considered how different cosmologies inform its purposes and uses, extending our understanding of technology to practices of ritual, healing, and perception alongside mechanical and digital media.

Our pre-biennale research drew a parallel between the dislocations of industrial modernity of the late 19th and early 20th century and the contemporary rise of algorithmic automation and artificial intelligence. We examined how technological acceleration and alienation have prompted artists to seek other ways of knowing, from modernist engagements with spiritualism and Surrealist experiments with automatic writing and trance to contemporary practices drawing on ancestral and nonhuman knowledge. These connections challenged the assumption of technological progress as a steady displacement of spiritual belief, directing attention to their continuing entanglement.

Historical works and contemporary commissions traced connections between spiritualism, theosophy, shamanic practices, and the development of abstraction, performance, and moving image art. These histories entered into dialogue with feminist, anticolonial, and ecological concerns, including the recovery of suppressed knowledge and the persistence of ancestral memory. “Technology of the spirit” proposed ways of understanding and acting upon the world beyond the extractive logic of capitalism, without rejecting scientific inquiry or technological experimentation.

Moving image media was central to this framework as a material technology that makes the absent perceptible and whose collective experience engages the repressed and unconscious. The focus on séance provided a model for exhibition-making, linking spiritualist gatherings, psychoanalytic sessions, and cinema screenings through their capacity to alter perception and bring different temporalities into contact. Color, light, and sound became active elements of the exhibition’s spatial and temporal organization. The side film program at the Seoul Cinematheque (Seoul Art Cinema) extended this approach through cinema works concerned with ritualistic, psychoanalytic, and techno-shamanistic relations between the living and the dead.