To Scan A Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision by Tom Gunning

"These pioneers of Romantic life sciences took as their principle the unity of nature and the existence of archetypal forms (like Goethe's Urpflanze) through out nature, uniting the vegetable and animal world (and even the organic and inorganic) in similar dynamic processes of growth, transformation, and decay. As Ritter put it, "Where then is the difference between the parts of an animal, of a plant, of a metal, and of a stone-Are they not all members of the cosmic animal, of Nature?"5"-96

"Visualize such metaphors.."

"Not the least of my discomforts with the current term new media comes from the linear succession it inflicts on our still emerging understanding of media history-as if the prime modernist virtue of renewal followed automatically from technical innovation and commercial novelty. "-97

"Although a discredited and untimely concept in both philosophy and science, the phantasm provides a tool for thinking through modern including "new"-media. I believe that in the new media environment based in the proliferation of virtual images, the concept of the phantasm gains a new valency as an element of the cultural imaginary. The ghost has emerged as a powerful metaphor in recent literary studies, cultural history, and even political theory. An examination of their history of representation, including the newly emerging visual devices can sharpen and renew these metaphors."-98

"wavers ambiguously between the visible and the invisible"-98

"offers not only a literal image of a phan tasmatic body (visible, yet seen through); it also recalls for us the transparent nature of film itself, its status as a filter of light, a caster of shadows, a weaver of phantoms. "Transparent, almost a phantom." The act of seeing encounters abizarre entity whose quasi-ethereal nature marks the limit (or contradiction) of visibility. By displaying the most primitive form of cellular life through the most modern of media"-98

"but also explores an uncanny dialectic of the visible and the invisible introduced by technologically mediated images"-98

" Bulwar's lesson, despite using scientific footage, occurs in a fictional film, but the attempt to establish an occult invisible world of phantoms through the modern devices of photography has historical foundation."-99

"photographic images that were offered as evidence of the existence of spirits or ghosts"

"If these images (spirit photography) continue to fascinate us, this may come less from what they indicate about a belief in ghosts than what they reveal of our beliefs about photographs. Rather than focusing on the claims made for such photographs as proof of the existence of a spirit world, I want to explore their formal, visual nature-and how these images affect us as viewers. the term phantasmatic denotes images that oscillate between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, often using transparency or some other manipulation of visual appearance to express this paradoxical ontological status. .....revealing hidden assumptions about the nature of the visual image, still haunt our modern media landscape.

.....bodies rendered optically strange, semitransparent or out of focus, dissolving into shrouds of gauze or simply incongruously "floating" in the space of the photo graph.

This iconography of ....... but mimes a visual experience that exceeds or contradicts normal conditions of sight and recognition.

their incongruous juxtaposition yields an eerie image of the encounter of two onto logically separate worlds. Like the free-floating polyp of Bulwer's demonstration, Spirit Photographs portray a fissured space, one that allows visitors from another dimension to peek through, hovering within (or beyond), the space occupied by the "normal" figures. "