ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the importance of mediums in the production, import, export, transmission and legitimisation of spiritual knowledge and practice. It introduces the notion of ‘digital spirits’ as first referring to religious practices that are mediated through digital technology. By taking this notion one step further, the chapter considers the digital aspects of religious traditions and philosophies, where ‘being digital’ expresses the intersection between spiritual abstraction and material practice. By locating the many assemblage points of ‘being digital’ and ‘being spiritual’ in popular religion in Singapore, the discussion leads to explicating the interactions between entangled mediums in a religious context. On the one hand, contemporary offerings of religion heavily incorporate digital technology. On the other hand, such religions have the numen (or potential) to involve technological mediation in the materialisation of their gods and spirits. Conceived in theatrical terms, a religious event can be understood as the gathering of media to sensorially and corporeally point to [Latin: dig/dict or Traditional Chinese: 數碼, and to gather digits] a spiritual presence.
