Art, Media, and Spirituality: Haunted by Algorithms?

This article discusses some theoretical issues concerning the close relationship between media, art, and culture, using the privileged view of memory. In particular, the aim is to present a socio-anthropological analysis of the relationship between media and individual and social memory, which highlights the fundamental role played by art, understood in a broad sense as an “agency of cultural mediation”, able to objectify, fi x and extend the social memory allowing its consolidation in the present and its projection into the future. A particular look will be given to the original relationship between artistic objects, magic, and religion, to present a possible parallel reading of the social meaning attributed to the media also in contemporary societies. Art, like the media, performs a socio-anthropological function of building a relational bridge between yesterday and today, between the living and the dead, between the physical and the immaterial world, and between the visible and the invisible. In this, art and the media are “cultural agencies”, capable of conveying identity, meaning, expectations, and hopes. This matrix can explain the trend, even in contemporary society, to attribute to the media, especially the digital ones, a magical, spiritual, and quasi-religious relevance and power. A trend which, among other things, questions the alleged secularisation of contemporary Western societies.