Arcana in the feed: Navigating internet culture with Jungian archetypes
In the worldview of the controversial psychologist and mystic C. G. Jung, the archetype is a unique object which can exist simultaneously in both the physical world and the psyche; in both ideology and praxis, both online and away from keyboard. It transcends, unifies and intersects the spaces between seemingly disconnected worlds. In this workshop, participants shall learn about understanding the human psyche through archetypal models such as the Tarot, and apply these principles to identify and imagine internet-native manifestations of such archetypes.
The workshop will start with a 30 minute talk, in which the lecturers outline the basic concepts of Jungian archetypes and the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Lecturers will consider both the positive and negative aspects of seeing the world through archetypal optics, and advice participants to strive to free themselves from any oppressive pre-wired aspects of the psyche. The audience will look at the Internet as a playground of the subconscious – a place where they can easily spot and encounter archetypal symbolism. Lecturers will discuss machine learning models using crowd-sourced information on the Internet as their training datasets, and look at their inherent biases, e.g. the well known sexist seq-2-seq translations and racist GPT-3. Using this theoretical framework, participants shall be able to ask the following questions:
- Are the well known archetypes of human psyche present on the Internet?
- Can the Internet be considered a reflection of human minds and collective consciousness?
- Is the archetypal view on society enforcing the patriarchal model?
- Can they be used to subvert current dominant modes of thinking?
- Can the fact that the Internet is such a superconnected network give rise to unexpected emergent properties, like creation of archetypes never seen before?
- How can the Tarot and its representation of the world help us understand this system?
- Can archetypal forces help us achieve a more fair and compassionate society?
This workshop is held by Hermetechnics Inc.
If you would like to attend any festival event but can't pay the fee, the organizers will gladly waive it for you, just please contact them at festival@uroboros.design.