Hauntology Beyond the Cinema: the Technological Uncanny

2015

2015

Fear 2000 Horror Now Conference (Sheffield Hallam University, 6-7 April 2018) Lots of interesting contributions have been written on found-footage horror movies and on the ways in which technology and its narrative presence can become a vehicle for the representation and diffusion of fear. Assuming a Foucauldian perspective, the most intriguing element in movies such as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity etc. is the fact that the grammar of fear is constructed using the same apparata that constitute our contemporary mediasphere. In this sense, this kind of horror offer a peculiar point of view on the politic of the gaze that is inscribed within the technology that we use every day. Given that nowadays we are living in an historical moment where technology changes rapidly, we can expect to identify new trends in horror or specific films that deal with the innovations that concern the ways in which we see, produce and work with images. This is the case of screencasting horror, a new and yet unexplored subgenre that the paper will address to underline the new ways in which (new) technologies are used to create fear. Screencasting horror appears to be the natural prosecution of the aesthetic that was typical of found footage horror, and yet the proper visual problem connected with it appears to be different: in this specific case we share the point of view of a machine (as in Unfriended), that is both a visual and killing apparatus. In this sense this kind of movies seem to resonate with some intriguing theoretical positions on the semantic consistency of the expression “to shoot” and on the role of operational images in contemporary visual culture (see Theweleit or Farocki). Therefore, the paper will address the aesthetical problems connected with the genre and will offer a first attempt to theoretically analyze a subgenre that has yet to receive this kind of attention.

Alphaville, 2017

Murray Leeder's exciting new book sits comfortably alongside The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature & Film (Kovacs), Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (Ruffles), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Curtis), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Blanco and Peeren), The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Blanco and Peeren), The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (Kröger and Anderson), and The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Peeren) amongst others. Within his Introduction Leeder claims that "[g]hosts have been with cinema since its first days" (4), that "cinematic double exposures, [were] the first conventional strategy for displaying ghosts on screen" (5), and that "[c]inema does not need to depict ghosts to be ghostly and haunted" (3). However, despite the above-listed texts and his own reference list (9-10), Leeder somewhat surprisingly goes on to claim that "this volume marks the first collection of essays specifically about cinematic ghosts" (9), and that the "principal focus here is on films featuring 'non-figurative ghosts'-that is, ghosts supposed, at least diegetically, to be 'real'in contrast to 'figurative ghosts'" (10). In what follows, his collection of fifteen essays is divided across three main parts chronologically examining the phenomenon.

The contemporary moment has seen growing aggregates of urban populations accommodate and get entwined increasingly into 'technologized' models of experience. The 'technological' is now seamlessly ensconced into the basic material flesh of the city's quotidian everyday life (Sundaram 2010). As the 'ordinary' today is peppered and constituted by humdrum technological objects, a foundational transformation in our sensorium is precipitated – newer regimes of materiality are inaugurated as our bodies are perpetually girdled by a new object-world. In this new changing experience of the material everyday, the technological also becomes a primary precinct in which negotiations with the supernatural (and the uncanny) get staged. The technological increasingly serves, in different ways, as the evidentiary archive for the supernatural, its site of production, and the premiere mis en scene of its performance within Hindi cinema. This paper closely chases the transformations in the contemporary horror film, focusing especially on Ragini MMS (2011) and 13B (2009) to understand how the spectral today gets densely intermeshed with the digital. Clearly distinct from the earlier Ramsay brothers productions, as well as the later moment that Sangita Gopal has bracketed as 'New Horror', these films locate the site of horror entirely within the technological. This paper argues that the technological is not merely the site through which the spectral articulates itself but also its thematic raison'd etre in a rapidly changing contemporary digital moment. While Ragini MMS explores the idea of the spectral 'poor image' – a ghostly MMS that haunts its own makers; 13B presents a television set that gets inhabited by mortified bodies of an earlier time who play out a daily soap that echoes and predicts the future of the family watching it. Low-Res Horrors: Grainy Images and the Technological Uncanny Journal Title: Wide Screen Vol. 5, No.1, February 2014 ISSN: 1757-3920 URL: http://widescreenjournal.org Published by Subaltern Media, 153 Sandringham Drive, Leeds LS17 8DQ, UK

Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, eds, Traveling Music Videos , 2023

This chapter explores the work of multimedia artist Julian House how it has travelled across different contexts. House, who belongs to the British creative agency Intro, and co-runs the esteemed independent music label Ghost Box, started work as a designer and has since moved into producing music, creating music videos, and other short pieces of audio-visual work. Ghost Box is a label closely linked to the emergence of musical hauntology and House is one of the most important contributors to a broader hauntological audio-visual aesthetic. This chapter chiefly examines the work that he has produced for Ghost Box, which includes album art, posters, music videos, and other associated audio-visual media, alongside his other commissioned works, including film-related work, which includes the title sequence for the film-within-a-film, The Equestrian Vortex, which appeared within Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012); the credits sequence for Strickland’s In Fabric (2018); and the end credit sequence for Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013).

It is a discussion that works forward: what may be happening after physical death and burial: the 'afterlife' of death across expanses of time and memory, and the contemporary 'media archaeological' documentation and effect of media analysis during contemporary investigative work at haunted locations. The potential means of 'documenting' presence is only part of this 'ghost story', untold stories remain. These, the 'para-historical' elements extracted through 'media archaeologies' at haunted locations, remain largely unchallenged and/or ignored in most paranormal investigations. A core issue is how these contemporary 'media archaeologies' have 'reembodied' the dead, reintroducing bodily-cultural configurations in their widest ('wildest') sense of continuing enactments of presence today at these haunted locations. 'Para-histories', the stories so far told of haunted spaces, create 'placeknots' that set the stage for the haunting continuity of locations through these 'media archaeologies'. Most, however, do not offer alternative modes of perception, but rather are a way to keep the para-community tied together, tightening the knot toward conformity and para-unity. The question: do intense saturations of darkened spaces, time and again, create what has been called a "network of technologies that allow a given culture to select and store relevant data" (Kittler 1992: 218)? Is this 'media archaeology' that is occurring at haunted locations really relevant in any analysis and meaning-making of these haunted locations? Regarding this question (and questioning) is whether 'ghost-tech' devices, as forms of 'media archaeology', stimulate and enhance communication with past cultural beings or 'ghosts' which, in turn, affect investigator perception of reality at these locations. Any analysis of communication and its effect would center, I suggest, on Lehmann's notion of the "politics of presence", as an aesthetics of "response-ability" (2006: 185), as well as responsible investigative fieldwork. Usually, this 'politics of presence' is not separated from the politics of the world of 'para-media' which massively shape most perceptions, filtered as 'media archaeologies', at these haunted locations. This 'politics' imprints 'paranormal' onto much of the uncanny experiences that are perceived (and recorded) at haunted locations, producing, I propose, a "disjointedness between representation [what haunting phenomena is] and represented [anomalous photo, EVP, temperature drop, spike in EMF, etc.], between image [object or measurement] and reception… "(Ibid: 185). Disjointedness "is…confirmed by the technology of the mediated circulation of [these] signs" (Lehmann 2006: 185) exposed on social media and in 'para-tv' programming.

Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 2021

The construction of purpose-built cinemas in the early part of the twentieth-century was aimed at providing a safe and secure base for the new medium of film, and to gentrify this unruly and 'magic' medium, particularly with the development of the feature film which required a more established 'home' for it to be successfully exhibited. The motivation behind these new movie 'palaces' was therefore both economic and class-based in an attempt to remove film from its lower-class origins. Yet the intended domestication of the medium exhibited within the confines of the new buildings was never secure; in fact, it will be argued that such attempts were ill-fated from the outset, and that the ontological strangeness of the filmic medium was instead amplified within the new surroundings.

JAR Journal for Artistic Research, 2022

Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.