AURACLE
yesterday, a breath away
https://auracle-b56b32.webflow.io/#
When I first met with my project partners Emma and Vanessa, we knew we wanted to create something that lived at the interstice between reality and the supernatural. Our vision quickly turned to the subject of witchcraft, occult practices, and magic in the 20th century. We considered the commodification of ritual, how behaviors have developed around the notion of “buying an emotion”— take this herb if you’re feeling scared, or burn this to be a better boyfriend. Societies continue to the practice of certain rites that have been inherited from ancient peoples, oftentimes with no connection to the larger spiritual systems that they belong within.
Funerary rituals were the first to spring to mind with regard to this exploration, the dead body has been the site of mediation between the known and unknown since the beginnings of civilization. People still burn bodies and keep urns of their loved ones in their living rooms with little thought to why. Cremation ceremonies strike me as an act of communication, a mediation of sorts between the realms of the living and the great mysterious beyond. The ashes are just the souvenir. How can we zero in on this communicative space to build more meaning into our interactions with memories, and what are ways that technology can enable it?
“if technology could so transform our conception of the material world and its limits, why not our relationship to realms beyond?” -Devin McKinney
Early communications technology mingled the mystical with the rationalism of reality. The phonograph photographs the voice, the long-distance telephone enables us to hear voices of friends though oceans intervene, the wireless telegraph by waves of ether is a prophecy of conversation with inhabitants of other planets… etc etc (in progress)
