Techgnosis and Apocalypse

The Crypto Art of Sarah Zucker

Still from ‘The Dance of the Rendered’, Sarah Zucker (2021). Performed and crafted in studio with analog glitch processing on VHS. Digitally transferred and upscaled to 4k in Analog Native 4:3 aspect ratio.

In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the great American psychologist William James described what he saw as the four key elements of mystical experience: it is indescribable, it imparts some form of knowledge, it passes quickly of its own accord, and it is something that can’t be directly controlled. For James, this form of mystical encounter was a defining feature of religious experience and both the goal and, in some cases, the upshot of a religious life. But by the time that Émile Durkheim published his Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912, thinkers had begun to subscribe to a reading of religious experience as a system of social order rather than an individual lived practice. Toward the end of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber famously pronounced that modernity was the repudiation of the superstitious enchantments of the past, an argument that would shape much of the twentieth-century’s critical resistance to forms of personal religious experience and gnostic insight.

Still from ‘Be Not Afraid’, Sarah Zucker (2021). Crafted in studio with 1991 Sony Video Painter and original animation with analog glitch processing on VHS. Digitally transferred in 1080p in Analog Native 4:3 aspect ratio

My mind is returned to these well-known early-twentieth-century comments on faith and experience when looking at Sarah Zucker’s new collection…