Through Alchemy to Technology
Western Dreaming & Myth Making
Jonathan Marshal

Event Description:

In the west, technology is never seen neutrally, but becomes a matter for collective dreaming and myth making. This can be seen in the potent images which gather around electricity, nuclear power and computers; images which give the technologies a deep psychological life which cannot be simply separated from their supposed ‘reality’.

Through this process, technology becomes a living force we both fear for alienating us from the ‘natural world’, and something that we can hope will solve all our problems.

In this talk I extend the ways that Jung analysed alchemy, as both a projection of, and working through, the dynamics of psychic forces, to technology in general. I further suggest that our projections then lead us to talk about ourselves in terms of technology, and manifest our collective waking dreams and nightmares through technology.

Biography:

Jonathan Marshall PhD is an anthropologist and a QEII Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, studying the ways that Information Technology increases disorder and disruption. He has also investigated the ways that people live online, and written about the history of alchemy in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control, and Jung, Alchemy and History, and has published numerous articles.

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