Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, independent scholar, and 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, Slate, ArtForum, Salon, Blender, the LA Weekly, and the Village Voice. For many years he was a contributing writer at Wired, and he wrote “The Analog Life” for Arthur.

A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught workshops and seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen. He was one of the original minds behind Planetwork, an organization devoted to cross-fertilizaing information technology and global ecology. He has been interviewed by CNN and the BBC, and appeared in Craig Baldwin's underground film, the SciFi media critique Specters of the Spectrum. He wrote the libretto for and performed in “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” a Burning Man-inspired rock opera, and occasionally plays guitar in front of microphones.