Luke Pendrell

This work considers the ways in which, throughout human history, maps have defined our limits as much as charted our exploration. These images act as a kind of ghost vision – a spectral overlay of the world created and accessed as data sets, satellite imagery, and geopolitical mapping, merged in an algorithmically generated 3D mesh. This brings with it a view of the world in which complementary and competing navigational vectors collage and collide. Yet, for all its apparent hyper-modern otherness, its novelty and dexterity is still oriented around and contingent upon the temporal and electromagnetic limits of our biological inheritance.

If, as Derrida supposes, each era creates its own ghosts, we live in extraordinarily creative times. Our rational, technological world is populated with more phantoms than ever. We are paralysed in a frozen now, smothered by the massed murmurings of the past, stalked by the angry revenants of forgotten radicals and the awful twins of a future, that is at once inconceivable and yetinevitable. In this, final, session of the current Speculative Tate seminars, we take a spectral turn to explore haunting, the figure of the ghost and hyperstitional forms of temporality. The ghost, rather than supernatural relic of a primitive age, is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the modern world. From avatars and chatbots to bump maps and page curls, the digital world is populated with a host of skeuomorphic phantoms clothed in shroud sails of the dust scratches and imperfections of lost surface patination and the process noise of unfulfilled modernism. 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 byitself.

Geographies and the territories that opportunistically spring up to inhabit them, populate their landscapes and exploit their riches are merely superficial manifestations of more substratal tendencies of movement. What appears stable and static is, in fact, volatile, mutable, unstable. Coastal erosion, whether attributed to climate change or less anthropocene causes, can be read as a hyper-accelerated manifestation of geological time on a human scale. The processes of geological change, measured out in millennia and thus ordinarily imperceptible to the evanescent oscillations of human mortality, and the imaginations seated therein are dromologically condensed to a scale measurable in months or years. This sudden access or awareness, or maybe confluence between human and geological time, gives us a glimpse into the scales of the universe normally incomprehensible, and in doing so a glimpse too of our fragility and ephemerality. This article in itself ‘a quantity of faded images accompanied by only partial notations’ explores the way in which the tools and apparatuses we use to interrogate the detritus of both past and the present are unstable, mutable and often inadequate