Technoshamans

Technoshamans
Author: Carlo Pizzati
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2012-02-15
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1468538454

Technoshamans is a humorous, illuminating narrative non-fiction book in which the author roams the world searching for places where technology and spirituality intersect. The driving force of the book is the narrators quest for relief for a bad back which has tortured him for twenty years. Armed with his notebook and an open heart and mind, Carlo Pizzati embarks on a spiritual and medical quest taking him from a medical office in Northern Italy, where a posturologist glues tiny white dots to his front teeth, to the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, where he tries Rolfing massage and yoga. From there, its only a hop and a skip to California, where he is hooked up to the cutting-edge of computer diagnostics: a fancy high-tech toy which uses tiny energy pulses to read his orthopedic problem. The diagnosis, fittingly for California, is a karmic social crime committed in 1685 by a prior incarnation. Thus begins the second movement of Technoshamans. He flies back to the mountains above Portofino to attend several trance music raves designed to induce visions through electronic music. In Argentina, he experiences the famed indigenous shamans, but also aura-photographing computers and miscellaneous high-tech channeling gadgets. No mystical question would be complete without a passage to India. Whether hes in an ashram in Tamil Nadu, practicing Ashtanga in Mysore, meeting the Big Enema ayurvedic doctor in Kovalam or chanting mantras at dusk, or on the beaches of the experimental township of Auroville, being led through a tearful, explosive revelation about his past lives, he continues to dwell on his fundamental themes: Can spirituality coexist with the Machine? Are we going to download ourselves into androids? Will spirituality and technology do away with humanity? Technoshamans, through a compelling and closely observed first person narration, asks these questions and more.

The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music: Reaching out with Technology

The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music: Reaching out with Technology
Author: Simon Emmerson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2018-05-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131704360X

The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids – but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice – unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' – and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.

Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges

Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges
Author: Rae Earnshaw
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030420973

This open access book details the relationship between the artist and their created works, using tools such as information technology, computer environments, and interactive devices, for a range of information sources and application domains. This has produced new kinds of created works which can be viewed, explored, and interacted with, either as an installation or via a virtual environment such as the Internet. These processes generate new dimensions of understanding and experience for both the artist and the public’s relationships with the works that are produced. This has raised a variety of interdisciplinary opportunities and issues, and these are examined. The symbiotic relationship between artistic works and the cultural context in which they are produced is reviewed. Technology can provide continuity by making traditional methods and techniques more efficient and effective. It can also provide discontinuity by opening up new perspectives and paradigms. This can generate new ideas, and produce a greater understanding of artistic processes and how they are implemented in practice. Tools have been used from the earliest times to create and modify artistic works. For example, naturally occurring pigments have been used for cave paintings. What has been created provides insight into the cultural context and social environment at the time of creation. There is an interplay between the goal of the creator, the selection and use of appropriate tools, and the materials and representations chosen. Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges is relevant for artists and technologists and those engaged in interdisciplinary research and development at the boundaries between these disciplines.

Trance: from Magic to Technology

Trance: from Magic to Technology
Author: Dennis R. Wier
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2006-05-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1888428392

This book describes a new model for trance as well as practical techniques to analyse and design trances. Writing from his personal experience, Wier suggests that some of these ideas might represent new practical precision tools for psychologists as well as for those who work with the occult. Practical suggestions for meditators, yogis, witches and others are included to deepen trance and to increase the trance force as well as techniques to terminate a trance. Pathological trance and trance abuse are also described with suggestions on how they may be recognized and prevented.

CyberAsia

CyberAsia
Author: Zaheer Baber
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2005
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004146253

This book provides a critical analysis of the social consequences of the Internet in Asia. The papers discuss a wide variety of issues and domains, ranging from the economy and politics to interpersonal relations.

Shamanism

Shamanism
Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2003
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780415253291

This is an essential tribute to the vitality and breadth of shamanic tradition both amongst the most distant tribes of America and Asia, and within seemingly ordinary aspects of modern western culture.

Portals

Portals
Author: Lynne Hume
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000183246

As Alice in Wonderland discovered, cave entrances, tunnels, spirals and mirrors can transport people to strange worlds where anything is possible. Portals investigates how we move beyond the conscious and physical world using our senses, into other realities of the spiritual and the divine. Portals looks at the techniques used to alter consciousness practised by shamans, monks and other religious specialists. These include the use of drugs, as well as drumming, chanting and meditation. The book provides a new, anthropologically-grounded perspective on the wide-ranging questions about the realities of human consciousness and mystical, spiritual and religious experience.

Space Feminisms

Space Feminisms
Author: Marie-Pier Boucher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2024-01-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350346349

Employing a global approach to feminist theory, this book examines how scientific, popular, scholarly, and artistic imaginations of space have, since the 1950s, reflected and embedded Earthly hopes, anxieties, and futures. Rather than simply a platform for imagining the future, it cultivates radical and alternative modes of inquiry around space through seeing space as a material reality that reflexively encodes humans' self-perceptions of their planet and beyond. Bringing together essayistic reflections, artworks, and interviews with space scientists, engineers, and astronauts past and present in one volume, Space Feminisms inspects the transformation of terrestrially held notions of gender, race, class, and ableism as they migrate to the extraterrestrial, whilst drawing new connections between feminist thought and extraterrestrial power structures. Space Feminisms makes a radical enquiry into how earthly power structures are already expanding into our skies, facilitating a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, and designers to imagine radical constructions of human futures beyond Earth. At the intersection of scientific, cultural, social, and artistic speculations, the book gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and radical futures of and in space.

Pop Pagans

Pop Pagans
Author: Donna Weston
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317546660

Paganism is rapidly becoming a religious, creative, and political force internationally. It has found one of its most public expressions in popular music, where it is voiced by singers and musicians across rock, folk, techno, goth, metal, Celtic, world, and pop music. With essays ranging across the US, UK, continental Europe, Australia and Asia, 'Pop Pagans' assesses the histories, genres, performances, and communities of pagan popular music. Over time, paganism became associated with the counter culture, satanic and gothic culture, rave and festival culture, ecological consciousness and spirituality, and new ageism. Paganism has used music to express a powerful and even transgressive force in everyday life. 'Pop Pagans' examines the many artists and movements which have contributed to this growing phenomenon.

Contemporary Paganism

Contemporary Paganism
Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2011-02-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814790615

An introduction to modern Paganism and its roots and history The Pagan tradition celebrates the physical nature of life on earth, blending science with spiritual folklore. Considering the everyday world of food, health, sex, work, and leisure to be sacred, Pagans oppose that which threatens life such as deforestation, overdevelopment, and nuclear power and invoke ancient deities in this struggle for the well-being of the earth and its inhabitants. Contemporary Paganism presents a broad-based introduction to the main trends of contemporary Paganism, revealing the origins and practical aspects of Druidry, Witchcraft, Goddess Spirituality and Magic, Shamanism, and Geomancy, among others. Making use of both traditional history and the movement’s more imaginative sources, Harvey reveals how Paganism and its central focus on individual and social lives is evolving and how this “new religion” perceives and relates to more traditional ones. This updated and expanded new edition addresses recent developments among Pagans and includes a new chapter assessing continuing scholarly research about the religion.