The Internet is Haunted

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On Friday night I gave a talk at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne as part of their Ghost Worlds event. The night was inspired by both Mexican Day of the Dead and Halloween, featuring performance, music, crafts and a spoken word area.

The original talk, was part of a digital festival event and leant heavily on Ian Vincent’s research on Slenderman. This version was longer, and had more emphasis on Slenderman as a meme, and the way in which memes could be dangerous. I looked at examples of images and art that have harmed people, including fictional examples like Basilisks and The King in Yellow; and real ones like Slenderman and Gloomy Sunday. Or, possibly, the dangers of researching Statistical Mechanics:

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The best real-life example that I learned about was the McCullough Effect – which I find too disturbing to try for myself.

I enjoyed being in a gallery after hours as well as catching up with some old friends; Tara Gould read a creepy ghost story, which ended just as you realised what awful things were about to happen; and Umi Sinha did a great telling of WW Jacob’s The Monkey’s Paw

I enjoyed giving the talk and wish I had more opportunity to do things like this, but I’m not sure where the audience is for such things. I could certainly have talked for much longer about the subject.

The Internet Will Destroy Us

This Friday (28th November) I will be giving a talk at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery, as part of the Ghost Worlds event. “A nod to Dia de los Muertos and Halloween“, this includes a dance performance, salsa taster class, Latin DJ, bar, exhibitions and crafts. I will be part of the ghost stories section, speaking in a candlelit room about ghosts on the Internet.

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This is an expanded version of a talk I gave back in September, at the Flash-fiction cinema event. The research for that talk gave me terrible nightmares and the research for the new version is much darker. Last night I dreamed I was the only person found alive in a crashed plane which weirdly contained no dead bodies; but it later turned out I’d died anyway. So, cheery stuff.

Tickets are £4-6. I really looking forward to this talk, mainly because once it’s done, I’m never again researching anything this disturbing.

 

What is digital photography for?

1 – On my hard disk there are about 17,500 digital photos taken over the last 15 years or so. That’s a lot of photographs.

2 – Would my life be any worse if I didn’t have these thousands of photographs?

3 – The eleven photographs that illustrate this are randomly taken from the directories on my hard-drive. Would my life be any worse if I deleted eleven random photos from that directory? Is my life improved by re-surfacing these images?

4 – I take photographs of things that catch my eye; as souvenirs of moments. But I go back to very few of the photographs I take.

5 – The closing chapters of Benoit Peeter’s biography of Jacques Derrida are incredibly sad. After a lifetime wrestling with his mortality, Derrida discovers that he has pancreatic cancer. “He’d open a folder, take out a letter, and tell me a bit about its context. He had long dreamed of rereading all his letters; he realized that he would now never do so…” 

6 – The Roman philosopher and Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: Mislead yourself no longer; you will never read these notebooks again now, nor the annals of bygone Romans and Greeks, nor that choice selection of writings you have put by for your old age. Press on then to the finish: cast away vain hopes…” Marcus Aurelius died in 180 CE.

7 – The irony of the quote from Marcus Aurelius is that his notebooks are one of the most precious pieces of literature our civilisation has produced. But I don’t think my photographs would mean much to anyone else. And I’m not sure how important they really are to me. Are they even worth the effort of maintaining backups? 

8 – The photographs I like best are the sequences that tell stories. I’ve relived trips with companions, the photographs reminding us of stories, meals, the feeling of being lost. But they don’t mean much without us there to give them context.

9 – I do wish I had more photos of myself when younger. But that comparison between selves is of no importance to anyone else. But I keep these photographs in case I someday find a use for them, or a need for them.

10 – I worry about what will happen when I die. Will someone go through all that data I have kept just in case? Will they feel an obligation from it?  My laptop and backups should probably be wiped once I’m gone. I’d hate for anyone to look at these photos and wonder why I took them, to wonder what they meant.

(if you hover over the images there should be some text explaining a little about them)