Iris Long | Guo Cheng: An Absurd Response to the Planetary Absurdity
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Text: Iris Long
Published on Heichimagazine
In “A Room with a Voice: Mediums and Mediation in Thailand’s Information Age,” anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris uses Thai psychics’ obsession with the media technology of “future remembrance” to raise a new and interesting perspective: psychics respond to the calls of technology, but the ways they use such technology might more appropriately be described as “summoning.” The author furthermore describes a “future occasion,” in which information and signals “will fly around the globe as miraculously as a spirit who descends from another time,” and “the telephone line will become the repository of radio signals that were sent long ago, or which are being sent elsewhere but are overheard nonetheless.”1 Of course, all the technological traces left behind by humans are liable to become a past that can be summoned and intervened in.