Erik Davis in conversation with Julia Pond

Erik Davis and Julia Pond talk about psychedelic dance and the way altered states of mind and movement interact. Topics range from bone-dancing at Grateful Dead shows ("The bands were incidental to the dance"), the way movement resonates through time and generations, and the salvage rhythms of late capitalism (with thanks to Anna Tsing for the phrase).

Bios:
Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and most recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books, including Suzanne Treister’s HFT: The Gardener(Black Dog), Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave), Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico, 2005), Rave Ascension (Routledge, 2003), and Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle, 2002). In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals, including Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired and the Village Voice.
A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries, as well as in Craig Baldwin’s underground film Specters of the Spectrum. He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera. He hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.


Julia Pond is a dance artist, teacher and researcher interested in how embodied practices and dance interact with social and political themes. Julia has worked primarily in the UK, US and Italy, and is currently completing an MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban / Independent Dance, as well as podcasting, parenting, and teaching.

Read More:
Erik Davis: https://techgnosis.com/
Burning Shore Substack Newsletter: https://www.burningshore.com/
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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