Ghost in the Machine

Augmented Reality Animation and Video Installation + Performance, Bullet Armour Sculpture

Ghost in the Machine is a multi-channel video with augmented reality (AR) virtual experience installation. Viewed though an App on a mobile device, an animated layer is triggered by markers in the 3-channel video challenges the viewers’ notion of reality. The audio track blends real world sounds of nature and city life with more abstract sounds, many created from violin recordings.

Falling from other worlds, the angels in the video perform the experiences within and out of the body, weaving non-linearly through time, scenes and screens – contorting their humanity, connecting to their animal instincts, past and future, absorbed by emotion. An omniscient animated gargoyle stalks from above represents that elusive, cold energy of our consciousness, which is neither evil nor good – a strange feeling akin to a mental short circuit of time. It is an asexual, non-evil part of the subconscious, in reference to Descartes’ theory of mind-body duality. In the search for the materiality of the human ‘soul,’ a conclusion is derived whereby the ‘essence’ of the whole cannot be perceived through the materiality of physical parts. This is an attempt to make manifest a ‘spirit’ that exists in the amalgamation of experiences, distinct from the pieces of incoherent, disjointed, and momentary memories, that come to us in multiple layers.

The combination of these digital fragmented and framed layers of human experiences (in and through time) embodies how, in the contemporary, the ‘digital’ can create the ‘reality,’ continually challenging the role of technology in the transformation of human idiosyncratic experiences.