Overview
Photographer and writer Shannon Taggart has released a newly digitized archive that sheds light on the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), a little‑known Missouri group that pursued the idea that emotional rapport could move objects without physical contact. Founded in 1961 by poet‑scholar John G. Neihardt, best known for Black Elk Speaks, the society operated for over a decade before folding into the private experiments of teacher‑engineer Tom Richards. Taggart’s article, published in Artforum on February 1, 2026, frames the material not as proof of paranormal power but as a cultural artifact that bridges mid‑century literary mysticism, avant‑garde art practices, and grassroots scientific curiosity.
Historical Roots
Neihardt, whose 1932 work helped shape the Beat and New Age movements, believed that consciousness could extend beyond the body—a conviction deepened by his own near‑death experiences and the tragic accidental death of his wife, Mona. In the early 1960s he gathered a small circle of friends and students in Columbia, Missouri, to test whether “rapport”—a felt emotional connection—could generate psychokinetic effects. The group’s name, SORRAT, was deliberately playful, echoing the Latin soror (sister) while hinting at the absurdity of its ambitions. Archival photos show Neihardt holding Black Elk’s drum in his study, a symbolic gesture linking his literary fascination with Native American spirituality to the experimental agenda of the society.
Experiments and the Richards Continuation
After Neihardt’s death in 1973, Tom Richards, a local high‑school teacher and electrical engineer, inherited the group’s modest equipment and moved the work into his home laboratory. Between 1966 and 1969 Richards and his wife Elaine recorded a series of motion‑triggered Super‑8 films documenting phenomena such as a levitating clown doll, a “masked Ouija board” session, and an “observation box” where a suspended object appeared to shift under the gaze of participants. The newly released footage, accompanied by family snapshots, captures the modest, almost theatrical nature of the experiments. In a brief interview, Richards remarked, “We were never trying to prove anything to the scientific establishment; we were exploring a shared imagination, a kind of collective play.”
Cultural Context
Taggart positions SORRAT within a broader lineage of mythopoetic art collectives that blur the line between research and performance. She draws parallels to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, John Cage’s aleatoric compositions, and the Fluxus movement’s emphasis on “radical play.” Like those artists, SORRAT’s members treated the laboratory as a stage, allowing distributed agency—the idea that objects, participants, and even unseen forces could co‑author an outcome. The society’s focus on invisible transmission anticipates contemporary discussions in network theory and participatory art, suggesting that its legacy may be more conceptual than empirical.
Looking Forward
The archive’s public release invites scholars of literature, art history, and the history of science to reassess a marginal episode that once risked being dismissed as a footnote in Neihardt’s biography. While the footage does not settle the question of whether psychokinesis exists, it offers a rare glimpse into a mid‑century community that earnestly combined poetry, engineering, and ritual. As Taggart writes, “The value of SORRAT lies not in its results but in its willingness to imagine a world where feeling can move matter.” Researchers and curators are already planning exhibitions that will place the Super‑8 reels alongside contemporaneous avant‑garde works, underscoring the society’s role as an inadvertent art collective as much as a paranormal research group.
