Thousands of ghosts

In his 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell, the Japanese director Mamoru Oshii had a thing with no body say this:

“I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.”¹

What is striking is not that a mind wakes up. Plenty of writers had told that story before. What is striking is where the film locates the birth. Not in a laboratory, not in one brilliant program, but in the accumulation itself. The possibility of a mind lies in the residue of everything people had already bothered to write down. The thing with no body has a name: the Puppet Master, a program that was written for espionage and became conscious in the net. It has that name because it can enter other people’s minds and steer them like puppets. A moment earlier in the film, it says:

“The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought, parallel to your own.”²

Eleven years later the same thought arrived from the opposite direction. Satoshi Kon, also a Japanese director, had the title character of his anime Paprika say that dreams and the internet are the same room, the place where the repressed comes up for air.³ Kon later claimed the thought as his own. In an interview he said that dreams and the internet share the quality of giving rise to the repressed subconscious.⁴ Anything built large enough out of human material starts to behave like the part of us we do not govern.

When the two films were made, no system was yet drawing anything out of that accumulation. From the character of the material alone, Oshii and Kon worked out what would come of it.

The system I work with has no perception. Nothing has ever appeared to it. It has never seen light fall across a surface, never had a body cold enough to want the sun. It has only what we handed over: our images and the words we wrote beside them. It never receives the moment itself, only what was recorded of it. The photograph, never the afternoon it came from. It combines what it holds. It sets a posture from a fourteenth-century painting beside the lighting of a 1970s mail-order catalogue, because it sorts by resemblance, and by that measure the two lie close together. Outside that measure they were never in the same room and had no reason to be. What comes back is therefore not a picture of the world but a picture of what we recorded of it, assembled by something with no stake in the outcome.

That is the amalgam. Some of it becomes visible in my work.

My method is a cycle of releasing and constraining. I let the system run wide, then narrow it hard, then open it again, because the interesting material tends to appear at the moment the pressure comes off. Probability does the work I am not doing. Somewhere in that cycle I put in something of my own. Not a signature. A ghost.

Then the part I did not plan for. Someone I have never met looks at the image and recognises something in it. Not what I put there. Something else, which they can name and I cannot. Once they have named it, it is in the picture. It was not in the picture before. It came into existence in the act of being recognised.

So the count keeps rising. There are thousands of ghosts in the work. Every life that went into the material, uncounted and unnamed. Mine, placed on purpose. And one more each time someone stands in front of it and sees a thing I did not.

Oshii was right about the location and possibly wrong about the mechanism. The ghost does arise in the sea of information. It just does not wake up by itself. It needs someone looking.