SecondLife AfterLife - Interactive Installation, 2008 

This work is concerned with how technology both historic and contemporary has and still is becoming intertwined with ideas relating to spirits and other worlds. The merging of technology such as early photography and the uncanny brought with it a paradox: photography’s supposed scientific approach to truthful representation of the visible world and its origins in ‘magical’ instruments such as the magic lantern and the phantasmagoria and their representation of the invisible supernatural world. The work also explores ideas of 19th century spiritualism and how they used technology both optical and auditory to contact spirit worlds. The work also addresses more contemporary technology such as the similarities between the spiritualists séances and online virtual worlds. As Jeffery Sconce writes “in media folklore past and present, telephones, radios and computers have been similarly ‘possessed’ by such ‘ghosts in the machine’, the technologies serving as either electronic agents or as gateways to electronic other worlds.”