Page 20 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 11
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that otherworldly experiences are brought into the concrete
world of clarity and legibility. But when this happens they
are in danger of losing their mystery and power to make us
wonder. Much of human culture is a result of this ongoing
struggle between our empirical demands and the need for
an open-ended universe. We want our unshakable certainty
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and yet we hunger to be haunted.

The contentions bound to this antagonism are not exclusively
epistemological; they extend into ethico-cultural territory, as well. For within
a year of Durant and Marsching’s show, another event broadened further still
the degree to which transhistorical anxieties operate in the present.
Concerned with the consequences that a seemingly innocuous intersection of
worlds—art and religion—provoke, Alison Edwards and Lawrence Sullivan,
then at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, forced a defining
moment in empirical questions in the form of a book and conference,
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Stewards of the Sacred . Aiming at decisive resolution of still-remaining,
ambiguous and competing notions underlying distinctions between terms like
relic and artwork, Sullivan and Edwards identified a range of practices,
museological, governmental, and tribal, crucial to worlds in opposition but
co-present in the same space-time. Here, anthropologists, museum
administrators, artists, theologians, and First Nations tribal elders voiced
conflicting perspectives on the objective importance of unearthed and
otherwise reclaimed objects revolving on a singular transhistorical question:
which world now owns the rightful claim to the power, value, and destiny of
sacred objects? Whether as components of the archaeological record or
consecrated items in need of repatriation, all contention inculpates the
dilemmatic role, perhaps conspiratorial, played by the museum at a time
when the institution stands transhistorically across two conflicting world
views, one, belonging to contemporary institutional study, and the other,
anchored in primordial structures of birthright.
With art and culture, music, too, has echoed a transhistorical
phenomenology unique to cyberculture. Of innumerable examples, on, from
the collaborative work of Brian Eno and David Byrne has placed special
attention on the process. Presented neither as social study nor as parody, the
1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts carved out a novel act of re-
voicing. Adopting actual recordings that depicted a range of theological
experiences—homilies, religious quarrels, songs, and exorcisms—as thematic
metonymy for a larger sonic canvas, the album mortised the playback of
these conversions, transformations, contentions, and incantations with the
minimalist pulse of postmodernity’s precursor to trance. This technological
replacement of acoustic foundation is not just an incidental instance of sound
collage; in the act of substitution of an original audience present at the event