Luminary: Erik Davis

Luminary: Erik Davis

Erik Davis is an award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and “performance lecturer” based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, with photographs by Michael Rauner. He also wrote Led Zeppelin IV and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, the latter a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages. His essays on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality have appeared in over a dozen books, including AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man, Zig Zag Zen, The Disinformation Book of Lies, 010101: Art in Technological Times (SFMOMA), and Prefiguring Cyberculture. Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications, including Bookforum, ArtForum, Salon, Blender, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice. For many years he was a contributing writer at Wired, and he is now the editor-at-large for Evolver magazine.

Hyper-prolific freelance writer, independent scholar, and cultural critic Erik grew up in the milieu of Southern California during the heyday and simultaneous decline of the 70's "lifestyle" revolution in North American culture of which his native state was considered the epicenter. His early interest in philosophy led him to both study the history of philosophy and the folk contemporary "religions" and spiritual movements of his native state. His first critical and scholarly work of note began as a thesis on Philip K. Dick which he completed at Yale.

Erik emerged as a key voice of the Information Boom of the 1990s and, through his writings for Feed, Rolling Stone, Gnosis, and the Village Voice, gave human shape and divine meaning to Silicon Valley’s Cambrian Explosion of networks and gadgets.

The Visionary State
Technosis