Recordings Autmun Semester 2020

This lecture series will explore scientific and aesthetic approaches to nineteenth-​century occultism. Many canonical artistic pioneers and lesser known artists of this era found creative inspiration in the occult. Aesthetic innovators such as Kazimir Malevich (1879-​1935), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-​1944), and Swedish occultist-​artists, Hilma af Klint (1862-​1944) and Tyra Kleen (1874-​1951) were influenced by Theosophy. French visionary author, Joséphin Péladan (1858-​1918) believed that art imbued with occult symbolism could initiate a spiritual revolution. Austrian artist, Gabriel von Max (1840-​1915) expressed his fascination with the transcendent through paintings of clairvoyant seers and spirit mediums. Scientific practices provided equally fertile grounds for investigating unseen worlds bordering on the occult. Between 1880 and 1920, physicists investigated “spooky” action at a distance, as modern physics overlapped with parapsychology. German astrophysicist, Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834-​1882) took advances in non-​Euclidean geometry and knot-​theory as a starting point to argue for the existence of a fourth-​dimensional higher state of being. Epistemological claims to occultism thus participate richly in modernity’s aesthetic and scientific transformations. Join us in conversation with Per Faxneld, Sasha Chaitow, Mark Blacklock and Richard Noakes as we consider nineteenth-​century representations of the ineffable.