The Media of Mediumship (TMM): Encountering the Material Culture of Modern Occultism in Britain's Science, Technology, and Magic Collections

The job of the museum curator is not unlike that of the Spiritualist medium: their task is to reanimate a past whose artefactual remnants might strike contemporary viewers as moribund, obsolete, and disconnected from present concerns. Drawing upon the findings of the Popular Occulture in Britain, 1875-1947 AHRC research network, this project aims to bring new life to collections in the Science Museum Group and Senate House Library by revealing and taking creative inspiration from their histories of occult use.

Through an innovative and immersive public engagement and creative programme, it will engage and encourage new audiences to think differently about the history of technologies such as photography, radio, and telegraphy by revealing their central role in the spiritualist, occultist, and new thought movements which swept through Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; similarly, it will demonstrate how our understanding of alternative spirituality in Britain might change by recognizing its reliance, not simply on traditional or textual forms of magical belief, but on up-to-the-minute forms of media use, technological practice, and popular entertainment.

"The Media of Mediumship" is driven by the conviction that the history of occult practice in modern Britain is best understood, not simply through the traditional print sources that formed the focus of the original Popular Occulture in Britain network, but via replication, environmental immersion, creative production, and, where conservation allows, tacit engagement. As such, its audiences will have the opportunity to hear, touch, see, and make occultural technologies; they will learn how digital cameras may be manipulated to reproduce the spectral images championed by spiritualist photographers; use newspapers and tape recorders to replicate home-scrying devices; hear ghostly recordings of otherworldly voice and special effects repurposed by modern artists; witness a typical Victorian séance and learn how its most common phenomena were produced by expertly-manipulated household objects.

These activities will allow users to produce and test new forms of knowledge about modern occultism that is often unarticulated in written records, and also stimulate fresh interest in archival artefacts that may appear visually unenticing or inaccessible to the untrained eye. Taken collectively, the SMG and SHM hold the nation's most extensive collections of the technological artefacts-cameras, telegraphs, radios, etc- used in the spread of British popular occulture.

Yet the crucial role of these objects in Britain's modern spiritual landscape remains little known and poorly understood beyond academic expert communities. By re-interpreting them in light of their occult use history, this project will expand and newly engage audiences at these institutions, while also producing a much richer awareness of Britain's popular occulture than previously available.

Designed and led by PI Professor Christine Ferguson, CI Dr Efram Sera-Shriar, and PDRA Dr Matt Tompkins, the event programme and creative performances will run over the grant period's first nine months, with images and, ultimately, a professional film documentary of selected events, being produced and uploaded on the project's website. Across these site-specific and digital outputs, the project can realistically expect to extend the audience for the original network's outcomes to 6,000+ users.

TMM will track its impact through feedback forms and questionnaires gathered at the point of engagement; in its final months, the project will also gather testimonials from key participants and run post-event focus groups with representatives from target user communities, including photographic societies, museum professionals, podcasters, radio performers, and spiritualist practitioners. This data will be shared with participating institutions and used to seed their future collaborations and co-development of funding bids.