Structures of Haunting at transmediale

This year marked my first collaboration with the transmediale festival in Berlin, as part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), where I work.

The annual festival brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.

My contribution to the festival came in the form of the half-day ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, in which a group of 25 participants reflected on ways in which the present is haunted by past(s) and futures. What are the structures and infrastructures that scaffold this haunting, and bring it close both temporally and spatially? To explore this question, a group of seven artists and researchers hosted by Winchester School of Art engaged in a series of divination and séance attempts, seeing these as practices of enactment in the present, rather than of predicting ‘the future’ or uncovering ’the past’. Participants joined the workshop both online, and in the basement of a former crematorium in silent green.

One of the artists and researchers presenting at the workshop was Chera Kee, a fellow member of the Internet Ghost Collective who is based in Detroit. This part of the workshop involved a spirit box, which is a piece of ghost hunting equipment that scans through AM/FM radio waves, the idea being that spirits in the vicinity of those radio or sound waves can influence the words or sounds they stop on. Chera led us in a spirit box seance, where participants were invited to ask questions of spirits in Detroit or in Berlin. Some asked questions out loud, others wrote their questions down on paper.

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A variety of interesting methods and workshops from WSA colleagues followed this suitably spooky opening. Francis Gene-Rowe, a fellow LSFRC co-director, led us in an oracle-making exercise. Yaqian Lai’s PhD project explores the formation of spatial knowledge on digital maps through the lens of experimental cartographic practices in contemporary visual media, and in her presentation she played with the idea of an atlas as a visual method of divination. Yadira Sánchez Benitez led us in an experiment in seed-speaking and community imagining and building through a series of post-it notes. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad and making use of a communal reading exercise, Georgia Perkins raised questions of ‘weird proximity’ and touching across distances.

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Finally, Alejandro Limpio Gonzalez presented as part of the Ocean Matter Studio, which included a video art piece called ‘Haunted Wire’ that explored the cultural imagination sustaining the deep sea as space:

All in all, it was an exciting opportunity to come together to think through some of the overlaps between our work, and critique and engage with these ideas through our hands as well as our heads. I spent most of the workshop facilitating and coordinating tech, but also managed to make a little zine from the experience:

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Looking forward to more conversations with these exciting creators going forward.

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