Stuart Nolan on How Telepathy Made The Modern World
About the lecture: How Telepathy Made The Modern World. This lecture tells the story of how the belief that we can train the brain to develop extraordinary powers influenced the history of the 20th century. We trace a Western belief in telepathy from the fiery spiritual fervour of early 19th century religious revivals in the “burned-over district” of New York State, through the Human Potential Movement and New Age thought, to the positive psychology movement and Elon Musk’s dreams of neurotechnological telepathy. We encounter stage mindreaders such as Alexander “The Man Who Knows”. We meet the preacher of positive thinking who became Donald Trump’s most significant influence. And we experience the telepathy technique that read Oscar Wilde’s mind. Stuart Nolan Stuart has been a professional performer and artist for the past 40 years and is currently an artist-researcher at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA), investigating the cultural history of mind-reading from 19th-century theatrical mentalism to present-day neurotechnological imaginaries. His art practice combines traditional disciplines of deception with innovative and questionable technologies that have included a mind-reading robot bird, an AI that believes in magic, fortune-telling Blockchains, and a device that makes a person’s arm invisible. Stuart’s Venice Biennale show Season of Sleeps used mindreading, hypnosis, and feats of memory and mental calculation to manipulate audience perceptions of collaboration, complicity, and failure while recounting the disappearance of Surrealist artworks in occupied France. His art-research project One Thousand Mindreaders involved collaborations with 31 organisations, including GoogleX and the UK National Health Service. Stuart trained a thousand people in Muscle Reading, a traditional theatrical mind-reading skill that enabled participants to find hidden objects and duplicate unseen drawings by holding each other’s hands. Stuart is co-founder of the Magic Research Group, Huddersfield University and co-editor of The Journal of Performance Magic. He was previously a NESTA Fellow in Applied Magic and Magician in Residence at Pervasive Media Studio.
About the lecture: How Telepathy Made The Modern World. This lecture tells the story of how the belief that we can train the brain to develop extraordinary powers influenced the history of the 20th century. We trace a Western belief in telepathy from the fiery spiritual fervour of early 19th century religious revivals in the “burned-over district” of New York State, through the Human Potential Movement and New Age thought, to the positive psychology movement and Elon Musk’s dreams of neurotechnological telepathy. We encounter stage mindreaders such as Alexander “The Man Who Knows”. We meet the preacher of positive thinking who became Donald Trump’s most significant influence. And we experience the telepathy technique that read Oscar Wilde’s mind. Stuart Nolan Stuart has been a professional performer and artist for the past 40 years and is currently an artist-researcher at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA), investigating the cultural history of mind-reading from 19th-century theatrical mentalism to present-day neurotechnological imaginaries. His art practice combines traditional disciplines of deception with innovative and questionable technologies that have included a mind-reading robot bird, an AI that believes in magic, fortune-telling Blockchains, and a device that makes a person’s arm invisible. Stuart’s Venice Biennale show Season of Sleeps used mindreading, hypnosis, and feats of memory and mental calculation to manipulate audience perceptions of collaboration, complicity, and failure while recounting the disappearance of Surrealist artworks in occupied France. His art-research project One Thousand Mindreaders involved collaborations with 31 organisations, including GoogleX and the UK National Health Service. Stuart trained a thousand people in Muscle Reading, a traditional theatrical mind-reading skill that enabled participants to find hidden objects and duplicate unseen drawings by holding each other’s hands. Stuart is co-founder of the Magic Research Group, Huddersfield University and co-editor of The Journal of Performance Magic. He was previously a NESTA Fellow in Applied Magic and Magician in Residence at Pervasive Media Studio.