Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Religion & beliefs

STRANGE FREQUENCIES

Peter Bebergal

The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural

This is a journey through the various attempts artists, scientists, and tinkerers have made to communicate with the otherworldly, using various technologies, from cameras to radiowaves.

STRANGE FREQUENCIES takes readers on an extraordinary personal and historical journey to discover how people have used technology in an effort to search for our own immortality. Bebergal builds his own ghostly gadgets to reach the other side, too, and follows the path of famous inventors, engineers, seekers, and seers who attempted to answer life's ultimate mysteries. He finds that not only are technological innovations potent metaphors keeping our spiritual explorations alive, but literal tools through which to experiment the boundaries of the physical world and our own psyches.

Bebergal takes the reader alongside as he explores
- the legend of the golem and the strange history of automata;
- a photographer who is trying to capture the physical manifestation of spirits;
- a homemaker who has recorded voicemails from the dead;
- a stage magician who combines magic and technology to alter his audience's consciousness;
- and more.

Peter Bebergal writes widely on the speculative and slightly fringe. His essays and reviews have appeared in NewYorker.com, The Times Literary Supplement, Boing Boing, The Believer, and The Quietus. He is the author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, and The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God (with Scott Korb). Bebergal studied religion and culture at Harvard Divinity School.

Available products
Book Published 2018-10-23 by TarcherPerigee
Book Published 2018-10-23 by TarcherPerigee

Comments

Bebergal dives into the relationship between technical and occult imagination and comes up with something profound about the human experience. By turns funny, spooky, thought-provoking, and moving, Strange Frequencies is brilliant work.

Ever dream of building a monster in your basement? Photographing ghosts? Entering drug-free states of euphoria? You're not alone. In this brilliant, knowing, and thrill-a-page historical and literary exploration, Peter Bebergal explores the human endeavor to use technology to probe hidden and forbidden zones. Strange Frequencies expands how we understand technology, and takes us into shadowy realms where science and strangeness intermingle.

With all human culture arguably evolved from Palaeolithic shamanism, Bebergal engagingly explores the uncanny overlap between an ancient landscape of occult ideas and today's techno-saturated environment, from Victorian table-tilting to the digitally remastered voices of the dead; from confidence tricksters, through the desperate or delusional, to the artists and visionaries currently exploring this marvelous, ectoplasm-damp material. An absorbing, comprehensive guide to the high-definition séance parlor of the modern world, and a timely reminder that, in contemporary civilization, we are never more than a couple of centuries away from an alchemist.