DRAFT IGNIS FATUUS Ghost lights: all the dead voices. HIC SUNT DRACONES THE DOXA OF THE SPECTRE. Speculative Tate Seminars: Haunters and the haunted If as Derrida supposes each era has creates its own ghosts, we live in extraordinarily creative times. Each era creates its own spectres, its own phantoms, and ultimately itself becomes a spectral legacy. An era’s technologies are both the creator of this new spectrality and a reflection of the preoccupations that created them. We make new tools to find the ghosts we need and fashion the ghosts we seek from the tools that we have made. Our rational, technological world is more bepopulus with phantoms than ever. Each ghost exorcised by science precipitates a host of new phantoms rushing to supersede it. I want to look at the frameworks and rules that we impose on the ghost or if you prefer that constrain the ghost. Repetition. Geographic tethering. A need for energy. No wonder ghosts it seems that in their popular cinematic manifestations they just want to die. Perhaps reflecting our own suspicions that the hereafter might be just another induction event. The boundaries of our sensoria have become porous, liminal, fungible. Technological augmentation has enabled us to transpose our perceptual framework to regions previously unknown, not just to explore the further reaches of the electro magnetic spectrum but into the chaotic ‘spookiness’ of the quantum realm. Quantum cameras construct images from particles that have never interacted with the objects they portray. In the macrocosmic and the microcosmic, the gaps in the schema are wider than ever. We are haunted by the loss of body that the faustian pact of digital omnipresence entailed. The digital world is populated with the ghost of the object. The ghost, rather than supernatural relic of a primitive age, is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the modern world. Immateriality and spectrality are axiomatic to the digital realms we inhabit. Whether these persistent incursions are understood in religious, ontological, scientific or epistemological terms, they taunt us by flouting our schemata. Life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. Everything that was once directly lived is now haunted by itself. The map is haunted by the ghost of the territory it has superceeded and by the places it does not know or cannot show. The territory is in turn both defined and haunted by the absences indicated and thereby created by the map.