Ken Goldberg

Robotics researcher, industrial engineer, new media artist, Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000, is an online ouija board, which Goldberg sees as the world’s oldest telecommunications device. A webcam broadcasts an image of a real ouija board that users control by answering questions via their mouse (Will Jane be less irritable in 2005? Will the human genome be decoded this year?). Software aggregates all the simultaneous users answers and directs a robotic arm to control the standard Ouija planchette viewable via a web cam. “Contacting the Spirit World, Ouija 2000” is the marketing logo of the entering page and it conjures up not just a bunch of teenagers hunched over some candles, incense, and a dusty old board, but an industry of believers and the market economy that takes advantage of supernatural longing. Ouija 2000 is a fascinating collaborative online paranormal experience, but it is equally a critique of the appropriations of spirituality in all its form by corporate technologies.

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