Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness

The video essay Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness is an artistic research output that exemplifies Matěj PavlĂ­k’s approach to historiography, developed through individual projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. PavlĂ­k’s work often focuses on a reflexive approach to fiction, speculation, or myth-making. In this essay, the artist examines the role of borderline science technologies invented in late socialist Czechoslovakia. These technologies (e.g., telesthesia, healing, and locating geopathogenic zones) were linked to research in borderline scientific fields like psychotronics and psychoenergetics. The artist critically analyzes these technologies, highlighting their socio- political and economic contexts. PavlĂ­k suggests that these technologies were responses to the specific crises of high modernity, compensating for feelings of alienation or powerlessness. How can we grasp these techniques and technologies in the present? He hypothesizes that the emergence and proliferation of these borderline scientific practices, particularly healing, in late socialist Czechoslovakia might reflect the era’s disillusionment and the failure of Marxist ideals of emancipation. The attempt to treat individuals and the public space at the hands of the late socialist healer may thus have been a way to individualize social risks and harms. Throughout the video essay, PavlĂ­k argues that the institutionalization of these „wondrous“ techniques and technologies was an attempt to inhabit and adapt to the so-called pharmakon of late modernity: the poison and cure called the Scientific and Technological Revolution.