Presentation

"The modern media environment, the proliferation of virtual images and sounds that ever increasingly surround us, recalls earlier models of the relation between consciousness and the cosmos that drew on magical or supernatural analogies.13 I am far from proposing here a project of reenchantment of technology. Rather I want to probe the unique cultural nature of modern media, which confront us with representations that are fundamentally different from conventional realist theories of mimesis based simply in resemblance. However, rather than offering yet another review of the ontology of the photographic image as proposed by Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, and others, I want to explore the ontology and phenomenology of modern media of reproduction (the debates surrounding photography can be extended to both moving image and sound recording) through the metaphor of the ghostly and the phantasm. The ontological argument claims that photography not only por trays things but participates in, shares, or appropriates the very ontology of the things it portrays. In what way does the medium disappear in photography, abdicating in favor of the object portrayed? How does the photographic medium mediate? "-100-scan a ghost