Projects

Haunted Wires
IA4: Dreams & Echoes
Beachcomber
Mycomythopoeia
Cract!
Parsing Memory
World of Keepers
Time Odyssey
Museum of Imagined Futures
Distant Librarians
In Search of the Strange
Residue
The Pengguling Egg
this place [of mine]
Macabre Mail
Spook_bot

Macabre Mail

The Victorian age of stage magicians and optical illusions has always fascinated me. An era when spiritualism and modern technology collided, giving us people like Charles Babbage – computer pioneer and ghost hunter!

Despite technology being part of what it means to be human, new technologies often carry an air of the mysterious and magical. The black box inside which we cannot peek: ancient automata, Pepper’s Ghost, AI… Because of this, technology often lends itself to exploitation of that mystique, giving us a kind of new techno-mysticism for each age.

Victorian spirit photography is one such instance, in which charlatans exploited the potential for early photo editing techniques like double exposure to conjure the ghosts of lost love ones. (And promptly take people’s money!) Like a ghost to the light I was drawn to these eerie images. Photo after photo from tricksters harnessing new technology to connect their willing customers to something ‘otherworldly’.

While these crooks claimed to reunite people with loved ones via the spirit plane, I wanted to reconnect people with their kindred spirits IRL through something a bit more terrestrial: the good old fashioned postal service. So, I created Macabre Mail – illustrating new digital spirits over the old photos. I then wrote micro poems for each image, and turned them into postcards. They’re intended as a reminder that life is fleeting, and that technology isn’t the only way to connect.

I funded the printing through Kickstarter and, to date, have sold hundreds of these postcards – hopefully helping to create a little more analogue connectivity in this techno-futurist age.