<< The Hauntology of Technical objects :: Hackney Séance >>
Date :: 26 April 2016
Time :: 10 pm
Meet :: Bohemia Place, Hackney (Map)
Cities are haunted by ghosts. Past events linger within space. The subterranean Hackney Brook follows the path of the railway bridge as it flows under Mare Street. Bohemia Place, a small row of railway arches running to its left was the landing site of a second world war parachute mine, leaving a scar on the landscape that continues to effect the present.
Ghosts and spectres fascinated Friedrich Kittler. He perceived electricity’s displacement of the dead from the book and into technically reproducible media. He found them within the disembodied voices of the radio broadcasts and made the claim that ghosts, a.k.a. media, cannot die at all (Kittler, 1999, p.130). Donna Haraway was aware that, Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. (Haraway, 1991, p.152). Kittler’s invoking of ghosts is coupled with his construction of comprehensive media genealogies that link contemporary technologies to a technological a priori, often rooted within in the battlefields of world war n+1, but making its presence known in the technological everyday of the present. The spectres in Kittler’s genealogies are not those of humans; they are autonomous technological spectres that form their own anti-humanist hauntings.
Join us for a séance that ritualistically linked the site of a second world war bomb, the intersection of the underground Hackney Brook and the railway bridge passing over Mare Street and the technological ghosts haunting the Oystercard readers at Hackney train station.