All that Is solid: speculative, quantum, and cognitive aesthetics of telepathy and telekinesis

Telepathy is emerging as a significant paradigm of artistic practice at the interface of art and science, with telepathy operating in transferences of media, tele-technologies, and ‘techlepathies,’ as well as in social and psychological aspects of collaboration and interaction. Design researcher Usman Haque and artists Gianni Motti and Marina Abramović work with telepathic and telekinetic possibilities that arise at this intersection of art and science, as does artist, theorist, and cognitive scientist Warren Neidich. This paper will explore the telepathy of Motti, Abramović, and Haque through their artistic work with brain synchronicity and electroencephalogram (EEG) interaction, telemetrics, crowd empathy, media clouds, electromagnetism, and quantum physics. Their work is further understood through the prism of current philosophical theories, especially speculative aesthetics that engage the telepathy and telekinesis of quantum physics, as well as Marxist ‘Operaist’ or ‘workerist’ theories of immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism that engage with the ‘action at a distance’ concept of social theory. Further, speculative and cognitive materialisms are shown to intersect, perhaps paradoxically, through engagement with the aesthetics of telepathic and telekinetic immateriality. The aesthetics of this art and theory converge at the telepathy of quantum neurodynamics, which is aligned with, and yet displaces, cognitive intuition in Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetics.