A Catoptromancer
A Techno-Séance exploring how we use technology, superstition and magic to contact the pasts and futures that haunt us.
Made possible thanks to the generous support of
the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT)
and
Theater at MIT
The Team
Scenography and Scenario: Kevin Fulton
Choreography and Performance: Claudia Varela
Soundscape: Mackenzie Adamick
Associate Scenography: Xinyu Xu
Video Engineering: Emi Grady-Willis & KB
Table and Technical Direction: Joseph Lark-Riley
Director of Production (MIT Theater Arts): Maggie Moore
Administrative Support: Yi Tu
Special thanks to:
Victoria & David Downs
Helen & Greg Fulton
Lowell Whitney Fulton
Corey, Catherine & Philip May Fulton
Josh Higgason
Sara Brown
Christian Frederickson
Jay Scheib
Theater Arts Programming Committee
MIT Dance Troupe
Cambridge Fire Department
Joe MacLeod
Steve Younis
MIT EHS
A note from the creator:
When I was 29 years old, my grandmother died. Her name at her birth was Victoria Bingham Miller. Her name at her death was Victoria Miller Downs. She was kind, intelligent, generous. She didn’t require a lot: some books, her family, a cup of coffee. At the end of her life she lost her ability to create new memories. But all of her life she was a deeply curious, skeptical agnostic person. She didn’t believe in a higher power except the universe itself, I think. She told me that the odds of sentient life coming into existence were akin to the odds that a tornado passing through a scrapyard might assemble a functioning F-16. This to her was not proof of God. This to her was proof that there is a special providence in large numbers. Of all the planets in all the habitable zones of all the stars we can see and all the stars we can’t see, we just happened to come to be.
She loved our world. She loved ants. She loved apes - our closest cousins. She owned two monkeys, Paco and Zephyr. She loved them so much. But she didn’t believe in god or ghosts. If I want to talk to her, I can’t talk to her ghost. But I wonder what she would think about uploading her mind to a computer. I thought of asking a large language model to role-play her. To become her. But would that violate her agency? Would that step on her ability to just be dead? She had a DNR order on her nightstand by the French doors that looked out on the juniper bushes - the junipers, so fragrant as you hid among them in the frigid winter dark. No food. No water. That was her command. Hence, we might presume, no tolling the dead. No speaking beyond the vale of tears. But one does not own another’s memory. My grandma does not have agency over my memories of her. They are mine. So really who is to say?
My grandmother was the one who taught me of the Greenland shark. This creature, lurking in the Arctic Ocean, lives a long life by our standards. By most standards. The Greenland shark lives to be 512 years old. Give or take one thousand years. The radiometric dating tools we have are not great at dating something between 400 and 1,200 years old. The shark is a living ghost. A creature that dreams of its childhood swimming with stellar seacows and every species of long extinct whale. I think grandma would have liked to be a Greenland shark. Telling her grandchildren of that time she bit a viking.
So if I upload her thoughts, by way of my memory, my opinions, my love, my thoughts, my prejudices, maybe I won’t have my grandma back. Maybe I won’t get one more conversation with Victoria Miller Downs. Maybe I can have a digital simulacrum. A Greenland shark of GPUs. And maybe that would be enough. Or maybe it would let the dark encroach a little closer on our collective campfire.
-Kevin