Incredible voices: intimacy, embodiment, and belief in seances and smart tech

Abstract

This dissertation examines how theories and practices associated with early 20th century séances resurface in contemporary voice user interfaces, particularly AI voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa. Addressing claims that “the future is voice,” a recurring tagline accompanying products and research that advance voicing as more natural or seamless mode of human-computer interaction, I turn to modern Spiritualism and psychical research as a historical counterpoint that unsettles these assumptions. Séances comprise complex and contradictory vocal performances—what psychical researchers describe as “wildly incredible” phenomena—that both fracture and reify voice’s presumed intimacy, naturalness, and human-ness. The practices associated with modern Spiritualism and psychical research also demonstrate a preoccupation with voice as means to verify, lend credibility, or cultivate faith in intangible systems, and indeed in technology as such—a strategy shared with proponents of contemporary AI exuberance. Voice—in both séances and contemporary tech—is characterized by ambivalences, contradictions, and co-presences; I interrogate the ways that voice, in these contexts, signals present non-presences (Chapter 2), conjures bodies while affirming a dream of disembodiment (Chapter 3), and troubles indexical ties to a singular speaking subject (Chapter 4). Drawing on perspectives from feminist STS, I further interrogate the ways that both séances and smart tech evoke gender and race as organizing principles, as tools for constructing connections and boundaries—whether confronting the unknown of the afterlife or the inscrutability of algorithmic systems and big data infrastructures. This dissertation comprises archival research into several Spiritualist circles operating in North America in the early 20th century, which share a notable emphasis on voice in their séance practices, as well as an analysis of contemporary discourse regarding voice user interfaces. I also interweave a discussion of media artworks throughout, as a means to amplify resonances between the past and the present, and to further unsettle dominant cultural imaginaries regarding what voices are understood to be and do.