Haunted Media me·di·um n. pl. me·di·a or me·di·ums 1. An intervening substance for transmitting or producing an effect, vehicle 2. pl. media A means or agency for communicating or diffusing information, news etc to the public, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, or television. 3. pl. media. An object or device, such as a disk, on which data is stored. 4. A person thought to have the power to communicate with the spirits of the dead or with agents of another world or dimension. 5. A surrounding environment or substance in which something functions and thrives. 6. A specific kind of artistic technique or means of expression as determined by the materials used or the creative methods involved Technology is uncanny: familiar but also foreign. A recent Channel 4 programme “Living with the Dead” suggested that in an increasingly technological world we don’t understand everyday processes which are driven by technology so everything becomes unknown to us. In the nineteenth century it was possible to work out how the machines around you worked, but now, divorced from the means of production, the majority of us don’t understand how computers, mobile phones, or most technology involving microchips works. The programme suggested that this technological ignorance makes us more vulnerable to paranormal explanations and these supernatural rationalisations are inextricably linked with the technologies themselves. This isn’t a new association - the connection between new media and the paranormal is long established. From medieval associations of the camera obscura with the occult (documented by images of devils dancing in beam of light) and photography’s ostensible use to document the dead in spirit photographs, through to the invention of the telegraph, radio, television and computers, new media has consistently been associated with supernatural phenomena. At our current point in time, when analogue media are being superseded by digital, both old and new electronic media are seen as potential conduits for supernatural or fantastical messages. The amorphous spaces between analogue channels of communication and broadcast have been interpreted as potential sites for supernatural messages. This ambiguous zone is one which has been investigated by filmmakers and artists , and has been seen in many films from Videodrome and Poltergeist (TV) to Frequency (Radio) and artworks such as Susan Hiller’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine. The uncanny potential of these media is set against that of digital media which offer alternate channels and broadcast possibilities for interventions of the spiritual, which are seen in internet work such as Thomson & Craighead’s E-Poltergeist, and Nick Crowe’s The New Medium which posit cyberspace as vast etheric netherworld. Ether, although impossible to analyse has always had a semi scientific, semi mystical connotation; ‘the vehicle for both matter and spirit”1. We are now perhaps more likely to use the term to refer to the internet, an unknowable technological other where which to most is as logically inexplicable as ether. In this it relates directly to the perceptions of the telegraph – “the Victorian Internet “2 - in the 1800s. Morse’s electronic telegraph, was taken as a model for spiritual telegraphy or seances which “gave voice to previously ‘invisible’ beings, be they ghosts or women” 3, who predominated as mediums. Like Donna Haraway’s conception of Virtual Reality, it provided an important electric space that “disassociated the gendered body from the patriarchal realm of ideas and made possible new form of political and utopian expression”4. The subsequent development of wireless allowed users to hear actual voices from the ether and had the power to disperse consciousness across the universe in the same way that the internet is seen to have done more recently, creating an interstitial space for disembodied communication. It is this other where, filled with a rich mix of potential communication and banal junk mail which is referred to in Thomson & Craighead’s works Obituary & E Poltergeist: “The electronic ether is the space of global media vectors. It is created and used by governmental, military and commercial broadcasting and data gathering organisations alike while simultaneously binding millions across the globe into a an illusion of nearly familial proximity and intimacy. … Thomson and Craighead explore the layers of emotional experience that are emerging from this vapour of intimacy, fear, power and structured paranoia. In Obituary, they cast a sympathetic yet unflinching eye on a seance, site par extraordinaire for the ghosts of the electronic netherworld to cross the boundaries that separate them from the living.” 5 The internet work E Poltergeist presents the ghost in the machine as a lost soul, a wilful cyberspirit who interferes with your web browser and sends fractured messages or narrative fragments through search engine results which can be explored to locate connections in diverse parts of the web. Susan Collins’ Spectrascope also uses internet technology to attempt to harness / transmit the paranormal, in a similar way to parapsychology’s attempts to verify supernatural phenomena and numerous DIY ghostwatching sites (www.ghostwatch.net). The piece presents images from a haunted pub (www.carbrookhall.co.uk) which are transmitted pixel by pixel to the gallery live via internet. The previous night is still visible on the screen the next day, and the odd changes in light and fluctuations and inevitable 'ghosts in the machine' create a sense of suspense. The Spectrascope also creates ‘the fear frequency'. This is a frequency of 19hz which is just below the range of hearing, but which can distort vision (including spectral images), cause discomfort, dizziness, fear and even panic attacks and has been found at sites of apparently haunted locations. Reversing the usual process of parapsychological field research, the spectrascope offers up the technology itself as the space of haunting. As Jeffrey Sconce notes, TV was seen to create an ‘uncanny interactive zone’ between screen and reality, in which the supernatural could reside. The aesthetic of liveness rather than film’s photographic illusion encouraged this, threatening to absorb the viewer into a static no-mans-land as it does to Carol Ann in Poltergeist. He also cites the opposite fear - of TV’s simulacrum displacing the real world - offering a postmodern world of electric surfaces with no depth, like ghosts, or a splitting of personality between screen and reality. This fear is echoed in Lindsay Seers piece Then There Were Three, in which an animated, two headed ventriloquist dummy watches his image on a screen. The work is based on the possible identity crisis the invention of television caused the dummy who was John Logie Baird’s first transmission subject; causing in him a kind of doubling or possession, whereby he came to believe that he was alive. The piece is doubly uncanny. It evokes two of Freud’s cited sources of the feeling: ‘Doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'6 (examples being waxwork figures, dolls and automata ) and the idea of the double. “Despite ventriloquism’s history of necromancy and possession he had always been the form/the container for the disembodied spirit, now suddenly that container had lost its boundary. Struck dumb by his translation into image in the new medium of TV (‘seeing by wireless’) he suffered from the age-old problem of the ventriloquist – lack of definition as to who was the puppet and who the puppet master. Those confusions of over identification with a constructed other; an actor; a puppet, evident at its origins, set the playing field for the far-reaching and colossal affect of television on the subject.” (Lindsay Seers) Susan Hiller’s influential installation Belshazzar’s Feast evokes the uncanny associations of domestic technology and the video component was in fact broadcast by Channel 4 to homes across the UK in 1986. Again, according to Freud, we find things to be uncanny (unheimlich) when they are familiar to us (heimlich or “belonging to the home") yet also somehow foreign or disturbing. In a domestic setting a TV screen shows images of flickering flames originally shot at a guy Fawkes bonfire. The images are accompanied by a soundtrack comprising reports of foreign beings seen on television screens after the close of transmission, improvisational singing, and a description of the Bible story of Belshazzar's Feast and the Rembrandt painting of the story. Susan Hiller states: “Nowadays we watch television, fall asleep, and dream in front of the set as people used to do by their firesides. In this video piece, I'm considering the TV set as a substitute for the ancient hearth and the TV screen as a potential vehicle of reverie replacing the flames. Some modern television reveries are collective. Some are experienced as intrusion, disturbances, messages, even warnings, just as in an old tale like Belshazzar's Feast, which tells how a society's transgression of divine law was punished, advance warning of this came in the form of mysterious projections that thus became 'transmissions', messages that might appear on TV in our own living rooms.” 7 Patrick Ward ‘s Reception is a piece consisting of over 30 shots taken from feature films, in which TV monitors display ‘snow’ – a broken image from a video tape, a bad reception of a broadcast, or no signal at all. “The shots are taken from points in films where a unknown force is trying to communicate with a character through a TV screen or used as a plot device to signal something is about to happen or its aftermath. This quality, referred to as snow, signifies a space that is forever present and full of potential.” (Patrick Ward) Resembling early image-processed video works which experimented with horizontal drift and magnetic deflection of the image, the work implies an element of external interference which, allied with an ambient soundtrack, becomes unsettling portent of events unfolding in an unseen narrative.