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Susan Greenwood, Christoph Keller, ...: »Wir müssen Magie als eine Form der Wissenserlangung verstehen«
»Wir müssen Magie als eine Form der Wissenserlangung verstehen«
(p. 89 – 96)

Susan Greenwood, Christoph Keller, Susanne Witzgall

»Wir müssen Magie als eine Form der Wissenserlangung verstehen«

PDF, 8 pages

  • artistic practice
  • imagination
  • occultism
  • contemporary art

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Susan Greenwood

is an anthropologist based in Brighton, Sussex, working as a writer and lecturer on magical consciousness. When she first started her doctoral research in the 1990s on British practitioners of magic she decided to study magic from the inside, as a practitioner herself. Thus she explored various approaches to magic and participated in many witchcraft rituals, was trained as a high magician and worked with shamans. Greenwood then linked her practical experience to a scholarly approach aiming to build bridges between magical practice and academic discourse. Having gained her PhD in anthropology in 1997, she has lectured at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Sussex, and has taught courses on the anthropology of religion, shamanic consciousness and altered states of consciousness. In 2014, Greenwood was invited as a researcher to contribute to a seminar on the paranormal at the Esalen Center for Theory & Research in California. Her publications include Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld (2000), The Nature of Magic (2005), The Anthropology of Magic (2009), Magical Consciousness: an anthropological and neurobiological approach (with Erik Goodwyn, 2015), Developing Magical Consciousness (2019) and Astral Magic, Consciousness and the Imagination in Astral Bodies (2017). She lectures internationally, and recently gave a keynote to the Danish Ethnographic and Anthropologist Societies at the University of Copenhagen and a lecture on the subject of exploring magic in art at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Christoph Keller

studied mathematics, physics, and hydrology in Berlin and Santiago de Chile, and then fine arts at the University of the Arts, Berlin, as well as art and film at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, where he finished as a post-graduate in 1999. Keller, who now lives in Berlin, examines phenomena from the natural sciences from an artistic perspective, and also researches topics from fringe science such as the relation between hypnosis and cinematography. For instance, for his Hypnosis-Film-Project (2007) or Visiting a Contemporary Art Museum under Hypnosis (2006) he studied hypnosis techniques and applied them experimentally. His works have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Ars Viva Prize for Art and Science and the Recollets Grant in Paris. In 2011, working as an artistcurator, he conceived L’Aether (de la Cosmologie à la Conscience) at the Centre Georges Pompidou. His most recent exhibitions include Anarcheology (2014) and Grey Magic (2015) at Esther Schipper as well as Small Survey on Nothingness (2014) at the Schering Stiftung Berlin. He currently teaches at the Haute école d’art et de désign in Geneva.
Other texts by Christoph Keller for DIAPHANES

Susanne Witzgall

has been the academic head of the BMBF-funded cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011. She studied art history, theatre studies, psychology and art pedagogy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Stuttgart, where she received her doctorate in 2001. From 2003 to 2011 she taught in the department of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She has worked as a freelance curator, and was a curator at the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum München from 1995 to 2002. Susanne Witzgall curated or cocurated Art & Brain II (1997/1998), Das zweite Gesicht/The Other Face (2002), Say it isn’t so (2007), (Re)designing nature (2010/2011) and other exhibitions, and is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, and subjects of current interdisciplinary debates. These include her monograph Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003) as well as the publications New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (ed. with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, Ashgate, 2013), Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present of the Future (all three ed. with Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and Real Magic (2018). Since 2019 she is member of the advisory board of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam as well as of the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg.

Other texts by Susanne Witzgall for DIAPHANES
Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Reale Magie

Susanne Witzgall (ed.)

Reale Magie

Softcover, 264 pages

PDF, 264 pages

Gerade in den westlichen Gesellschaften lässt sich derzeit ein erneutes und sehr lebendiges Interesse an magischen Prak­tiken und okkultem Wissen beobachten. Das Magische und Okkulte scheint sich derzeit nicht nur zu einem gesamt­gesellschaftlichen Populärphänomen zu entwickeln, sondern wird auch im akademisch-wissenschaftlichen Bereich intensiv diskutiert. Das Buch »Reale Magie« untersucht die gegenwärtige Realität des Magischen und die Wiederentdeckung von Magie und Okkultismus in den Künsten, den Wissenschaften und der Alltagskultur. Es fragt nach den aktuellen westlichen Residuen und Praxisformen von Magie, nach möglichen Potentialen magischen Denkens in einer weitgehend von ökonomisierter Zweckrationalität bestimmten Welt, aber auch nach den Kehr­seiten des Okkulten.


Mit Beiträgen von: Carl Abrahamsson, Melanie Bonajo, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mariechen Danz, Demdike Stare (Miles Whittaker und Sean Chanty), Karianne Fogelberg, Susan Greenwood, Christoph Keller, Marietta Kesting, Verena Kuni, Annika Lundgren, Kadri Mälk, Jussi Parikka, Marco Pasi, Kerstin Stakemeier, Michael Taussig, Jeremy Wade, Susanne Witzgall.

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