I.2.1 Paranormal Photographs, Visionary Paintings: Exhibiting and Illuminating Paul Laffoley

• Louis Kaplan, University of Toronto

This presentation explores the exhibition histories and profound meanings of select paintings by the late American visionary and transdisciplinary artist Paul Laffoley (1935-2015) that are in dialogue with paranormal photography and that are difficult to locate solely within the confines of art, science, or religion. I am particularly interested in reviewing three large-scale works spanning five decades—Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara (1967), Thanaton III (1989), and Ectoplasmic Man (2011). The first painting is in dialogue with German para-psychologist Albert Schrenck-Notzing and reinscribes two séance photographs of Polish medium Stanislava P. and her alleged production of ectoplasm (1913). I will review clips of Laffoley talking about this work in exhibition spaces and catalogue texts to demonstrate how it brings paranormal photography into relationship with Eastern mysticism (i.e., Tibetan Buddhism) in fascinating ways. Meanwhile, the second painting has had a rich exhibition history including recent inclusion in Supernatural in America: The Paranormal in American Art (Minneapolis, 2021) and Alternative Guide to the Universe (London, 2013). This work deals with the artist’s obsession with UFOs and alien intelligence and includes Laffoley’s rendering of a paranormal photograph in it that he believes provides proof of his “contactee” status. Laffoley’s insistence on Thanaton III’s interactive dimension and the laying on of hands to be fully experienced also foregrounds questions related to the staging and display of paranormal works. Finally, I will consider Ectoplasmic Man (2011) which references both the hoax of William Hope’s spirit photos and Nicola Tesla’s interest in “thoughtography.” Regarding the latter, the work is specifically derived from a séance Laffoley staged to communicate with Tesla in the very hotel room where he resided. Throughout I will review the key concept of “mind physics” that frames the influence of theosophical, parapsychological, and hauntological thinking on Laffoley’s ambitious, mind-bending works.

keywords: mind physics, paranormal photography, Paul Laffoley (1935-2015), séances, visionary art

I.2.2 Smart technologies and the spiritualist séance: disembodied voices, “female gifts” and curating data

Alex Borkowski, York University

In June 2022, a presentation at Amazon’s Re:MARS conference (devoted to machine learning, automation, robotics and space) announced that the company has been developing new technology so that Alexa, the AI housed in Echo smart speaker devices, might be able to simulate any human’s voice after listening to it for less than a minute. As an example of Alexa’s emerging ability to use this mimicry to “make memories last,” the presentation included a video in which Alexa complies with a child’s request to read a story in the voice of his deceased grandmother. This paper takes up this proposed feature—channeling the voices of the dead—as an opening to consider possible productive intersections between the disembodied voices generated by smart technologies and modern Spiritualism—the popular religious movement that emerged in North America in the mid-19th century, founded in the belief that the dead can communicate with the living. Spurred by the invention of telegraphy and the new forms of immaterial communication it afforded, the spirit medium acted as human interface between the world of the living and the etheric elsewhere of the spirit realm. Crucially, spirit mediumship was considered a distinctly “female gift,” a skill facilitated by women’s purported sensitivity and “plastic” minds—a gendered positionality echoed in the feminine personification of AIs such as Alexa. This paper takes a heuristic approach, testing various resonances and dissonances between the curatorial conventions of the séance and every-day interactions with voice-processing AI: the shifting entanglements of human and nonhuman agencies within a domesticate spaces and the role of gender in domesticating media. A spiritualist framework might also offer a novel methodology to critically assess the powers ascribed to disembodied voices and the power dynamics inscribed within them, including issues of surveillance, data capture and algorithmic injustice.

keywords: voices, AI, spiritualism, séance, gender

I.2.3 Staging the Séance Room for Scientific Visualizations: Exhibiting Ectoplasmic Photographs on the Prairies

• Serena Keshavjee, University of Winnipeg

In 1923, after participating in table turning parlor games, Dr. T.G. Hamilton and his wife Lillian Hamilton, a trained nurse, made the decision to study mediumship from a scientific point of view. T.G. Hamilton designed a séance laboratory, setting up state of the art cameras, flash apparatus and designing a special cabinet for the medium. This staging was done to enhance the photographs, scientific visualizations, that were considered evidence that trance personalities survived death. Over 12 years T.G. Hamilton made 100s of black and white photographs, modernist in style, of telekinetic and ectoplasmic activity directed by a medium. Using these photographs, diagrams and extensive notes housed at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, in this session I will lay out how the space of the séance laboratory was curated to conjure up “ghosts.”

While these scientific séances and the photographs were meant to support a grand theory of survival after death, they also functioned as an immersive theatre. In a small dark bedroom in his home, T.G. Hamilton organized sittings about twice a week for 12 years, inviting his friends to join him in singing, chanting, and praying to create a favorable atmosphere to receive messages from famous dead people, communicated through a cheeky spirit control. While the séance events were crucial to T.G. Hamilton’s experimental methodology, he privileged the photographs, setting up 12 cameras in the bedroom, carefully staging the scene and finally, in 1930, putting his reputation on the line to exhibit the photographs publicly.

keywords: séances, scientific photography, spiritualism, ectoplasm