My exhibition “Spirit Interface”, for the Killscreen project space (now Gameplayarts), combined two works that I have previously shown separately: “Dunya” from 2021 and “Troubles of Presence I-IV” from 2023. Both works are video installations running live in the Unity game engine; “non-interactive games”. They both attempt to trouble the divide between the physical/”real” world and the virtual or the imaginary, using a vernacular of horror fiction and digital media. “Dunya“ explores the virtual world as ghost plane, tying into histories of haunted media, contemporary online folklore and creepypasta. “Troubles of Presence” uses concepts of haunting and the supernatural to trace a weird and eerie subjectivity in instances of industrially-produced or digital objects and spaces.
The two works share an interest in folklore, “the form through which we rhetorically negotiate and examine questions of possibility and belief” (Trevor Blank / Lynne McNeill), and weird and eerie horror, a “fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception” (Mark Fisher). These concepts feed into a critique of technology; as digital media and artificial intelligence become more and more ubiquitous in our lives, we understand them less than ever. I believe one of the pleasures of horror (related to what psychoanalysts call jouissance) is the breaking of boundaries, the anarchic mix of fear and excitement of that which refuses the accepted order. In a time when technology is increasingly black-boxed and centralized, it is freeing and exciting to think of haunted media, weird and eerie technology, something that even tech giants can’t understand or contain.
Thanks to Jamin Warren and Bryan Mungia of Killscreen for the opportunity, and all of my professors at the UCLA Design | Media Arts and Konstfack Fine Arts departments for their feedback and assistance during the creation of these works.