“To speak of ghosts is to describe encounters— endured, missed, imagined, or overheard. A ghost is a mere trace; there is no life, no pulse, no pumping blood, no object but a vague virtuality, a set of phobias and superstitions ready to be dressed, perhaps a blurry halo or image. And yet a flickering light, a sudden gust of cold air and the echo of a distant laughter cannot be entirely dismissed as notional—they affect real bodies in space and me. The ghost is active, it has breath (gast) and agency beyond mere appearance and disappearance. The phantasm becomes the key to unlocking a set of potentialities, but also a symptom, an index of deep seated motives, of unfinished business—memories, disease, ecological crisis and injustice. The etymology of phantasma, from the Greek phantazein (to make visible, to display) points to the ability of ghosts to unconceal or to give a voice. In this sense, specters perform the role of interfaces— their apparition mediates between life and death, past and present, material and immaterial, bodied and disembodied, natural and supernatural. Their liminal cries dissect signifiers and recombine them in new ways, peeling words from their established (normal) contexts and framing new contexts altogether. Spooks as translation apps. With haunting, translations become distortions— the magician’s trick erases causal links; deprives events of legibility; bewilders, amazes, gaslights. The door slams open by itself, independent of anyone’s apparent action, and that is why we fear, shake and tremble—as if we were accustomed to always perceiving or being in control of what happens inside and around us, in our gut and across the infrastructures and ecologies that stretch and twist around our biopolitical (and technologically enhanced) body. For a moment, we peer into the reality of our condition, we renounce abstraction and modernity and embrace that which troubles us— its invisibility, strangeness and frailty. This issue collects invited contributions around the theme of “ghostly” and its loose metaphorical ends. Pieces are organized in two clusters: “Protocols” includes research in media, technology and design methodology, as well as experimental architectural and artistic practices. “Fictions” focuses on story-telling and the invention and rehearsal of (less-than-) perfect futures.”
Organs Everywhere Œ 5: Ghostly –
Modern Lovers (Mdrn Lvrs) recounts an attempt to escape the city, by day and by foot, and will feature in Œ Case Files, Vol. 01. It’s accompanied by a series of photographs and short films, watched using an AR app (see screenshots below) and describes places that inhabit a number of different personas—an aggregate of the past and a potential future.
