Ghostless (Notation 1 - 3), 2023-2025
Featured:
Ghostless (Notation 3.)
Single channel video with stereo sound
11 mins 30 seconds
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"To be haunted", Avery Gordon writes, "is to be tied to historical and social effects". The Ghostless notations are a series of moving image works that considers another kind of horror – one that is about the absence or insensibility of haunting and temporal disturbance.
Ghostless (Notation 3.) unfolds in a world of memorials and insurances, examining a continuum of inhuman architectures that pervade the terrains of loss and mourning. It draws together sound recordings from an inquiry on a memorial space flight, a quantum computing refrigerator, and scenes of Carl Akeley’s early 20th-century dioramas at the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History and a recent display of the autonomous robot “Spot,” from Boston Dynamics, looping endlessly inside its enclosure at the Boston Museum of Science.
Following Jonathan Crary, the diorama may be thought of as a machine for producing affect and speculative presence. The two museum dioramas are chosen for their place in various cultural moments. The 20th-century dioramas at the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History were concerned with preserving threatened African habitats for future publics; the Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot diorama at the Boston Museum of Science demonstrates the futuristic possibility of a world absent of human labour.
The film focuses especially on the animacy of the unalive animal figures and acts of looking, as well as their own anticipation towards being regarded. The gazes of these inhuman animal forms—taxidermied and machinic, re-skinned and simulated—are not inert but operative, evoking future worlds of absence and persistent memory. They form “messengers and promises,” of our social worlds, as John Berger writes in his essay “Why Look at Animals”, from his book “About Looking”.
The soundtrack unfolds at first as the insistent drone of a recording from a quantum computing refrigerator, before seguing into a phone call between myself and Celestis Memorial Space Flights. In the phone call, I discuss the history of the company’s memorial space flight program and the logistics of sending my own late father’s ashes into space. In the vacuum of space, traveling with the ashes of others and other scientific instruments, the spatio-temporality of witnessing death, mourning, and the residue, is transformed with the insurance apparatus.
Spliced in parts are shots of a GIS simulation model of the rotating earth from Surbana Jurong, a Singaporean state-run consultancy company focusing on sustainable “green” urbanism. It draws a through line between these dioramas and other anticipatory simulations and architectures.
