Algorithmic Ghosts

What phenomenology between digital resurrection and automated imagination?

Abstract

In the context of the contemporary development of algorithmic technologies, the field of image production and manipulation is not only a technical innovation, but also a sociological, ethical and aesthetic one. With the advent of applications that allow the rapid processing of deepfake videos, for example, the indexicality that common sense previously spontaneously attributed to photographic and audiovisual materials is being seriously questioned. At this juncture, phenomena of “digital resurrection” become particularly compelling, both in the context of the domestic use of the new algorithms and in that of film production. At the same time, the introduction of algorithmic forms of imagination, in an interconnected horizon, pushes us to rethink our pre-digital phenomenological positioning, and to formulate new questions in the expanding context of the so-called digital humanities.