the anthology of the occult is a space to meditate on concepts of the supernatural and the spiritual— and what they might reveal about our desires and dealing with grief in a post-human age... loneliness, insatiability, and a desire to reconnect and know not only others, but ourselves, a bit better. i hold max weber’s theories on enchantment and disenchantment as framework for this project — postmodernity has created an interesting combination of disenchantment, and re-enactment. as 21st century spiritualist movements + a wave of growing interest in the occult attempt fight contemporary jaded/nihilistic tendencies, they simultaneously keep commodifying the movement through a dependency on spiritual objects etc! inspired by neo-spiritualist websites, i chose to format this compilation of projects to be reminiscent of early web design. to me this is a visual representation of the reenchantment as an early fascination with all the wonderful things computers can do, hehe:-) all of the websites on this anthology are inspired by different spiritualists of the victorian era, and (hopefully) communicate different zeitgeists of the time: psychoanalysis, automatic writing, spiritualist seances, dealing with death at a very large scale, and so on!! i had a lot of fun coding the spaces in this anthology, picking out how to physically represent the concepts i was trying to convey proved to be more challenging than i had originally anticipated. the seance poetry reading is inspired by sylvia plath’s work, and as we listen to her hypnotic speech and watch the ghostly interaction, i hope that it conveys a message of consumption and insatiability, eating yet never being able to be satisfied. i want it to comment on grief and communication with the dead, once you’re dead you just stay dead! delving into the subconscious was really exciting to make, as it presented many challenges of how to convey the psychoanalysis drawing process. this was inspired by jung (boo!), and while the psychoanalysis was generated randomly, i tried to have plenty of options that fit the “vague yet specific” variety. automatic writing was also fun to work on, as i wanted to convey a ghostly presence that writes at the same time as you do. i am not sure if it came out as spooky as i wanted it to be, but i still enjoy the experience it provides, and i hope you do too :-)
