Global Tribe - Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance - Graham St John

Global Tribe - Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance - Graham St John

Spiritual technology: transition and its prosthetics

Global Tribe - Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance - Graham St John

Graham St John [+-]
Griffith University
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Graham St John is the author of several books including Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (2012), Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (2009) and the edited collections The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (2010), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (2008), Rave Culture and Religion (2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (2001). He is Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith University and is Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.

Description

In its exploration of Goa/psytrance music, Chapter 4 regards this music as an assemblage of technics that have been sampled, remixed and repurposed to the variable transit of the self in reflexive modernity. The assemblages I call spiritechnics are guided by differing modalities of “consciousness”, shaping practices with varying means and ends: progressive and transgressive, nihilistic and gnostic, self-directed and planetary. Using a spectrum of sampled content programmed within psytrance releases and promotions, the chapter demonstrates how its sonic fiction orchestrates the departure from, connection with, and evolution of, consciousness. Whether concerned with the unconscious, outer space, virtual reality or the wilderness, re-mediated liminality is adapted by the psychedelic mystics and media shamans of psytrance to facilitate these conditions of transit. Popular culture, psychoactive (or more accurately “entheogenic”) compounds, and the experience of revelation are the media and the means  emixed by the technicians of transition.

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Citation

St John, Graham. Spiritual technology: transition and its prosthetics. Global Tribe - Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 101-151 Nov 2012. ISBN 9781845539566. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=20088. Date accessed: 09 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.20088. Nov 2012

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