The way The Blair Witch Project took advantage of a new media’s appearance as a reflection of “the real” vs. a constructed reality is nothing new. When photography first began to become publicly accessible…
need an intro bit here about new media and why it’s always immediately used to create/act as “evidence”
what the implication of this is when new tech evolves so fast, and when we have a “fake news” culture where there’s almost an expectation that we’re being lied to all the time
something about the “disembodiment” of spirits and the supposed disembodiment of the internet? is this too much of a stretch? something about the materiality of media? giving form to the things we can’t so easily give form to without art
something about the internet as a sort of like, veil space, because it operates between the physical and something other (i think photography can do this, too)
the direct genealogical thread between the spiritualists and “woo-anon”
georgiana houghton’s framing now a century+ later as an artist (maybe shining some light on the phrase scam artist)
WAS THIS TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING?????? the photos, her writing (essay, automatic writing, even a pedagogical guide to her work for her exhibition), the seances (performances), her drawings/watercolors…
frederick hudson (the photographer she would collaborate with)
interested in how she viewed her automatic drawings as collaborations (a connection here to how i’m using ai, maybe, because they’re not really collaborations)
the fact that she organized and paid for her own exhibition “Spirit Drawings in Water Colours” at the New British Library in London, in a time (1871) when it would’ve been difficult to be a female artist (had she been strictly creating through an arts context vs. a spiritualist context), and where she (as a religious/christian person) also wouldn’t have had much power in that space (again, as a woman)
https://medium.com/nightingale/georgiana-houghton-visualized-a-world-beyond-death-f3666dddd9ef i just already knew about herb (i was really into spiritualist photography during my undergrad) but here’s a source that talks about her and her exhibition