Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (Boscastle, UK)

Isn’t it sweet that Google Photos shows me this picture when I search for selfies of mine on my haunted Android machine?!

Last weekend the great IMPAKT Festival took place. I sadly had neither time nor cash to be there so I’m really thankful that there was a livestream and I am slowly starting to watch my way through all the talks. I wholeheartedly recommend doing the same. You can find the videos here and the program here. In the opening speech Tobias Revell introduced the theme: ‘Haunted machines and wicked problems‘, an investigation of the relationship between technology of culture through the medium of myth, magic and monsters. He said:

“We live in a world of complex intractable entangled incomprehensible problems that exceed the bounds of human understanding. Things like austerity, climate change, migrate crisises. So having alternative frameworks and ways of thinking through those problems might give us some power. The first witches were persecuted because they were perceived to possess outside knowledge, knowledge that fell outside the bounds of what was considered the hegemony of capitalism and rational science. They were early feminist activists in that sense, and I think there’s a real need now, in a world of wicked problems, a political need to seize radical ways of thinking through the world, to seize technology really as an emancipatory framework and as something that can build better empathy between ourselves and others in a world that is increasingly anti-globalist, anti-intellectualist and anti-progress.”

I tought it is an appropriate intro to a collection of photos I took a few weeks ago on a UK holiday at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle and which I of course have saved for posting on Halloween.

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