Spirit Messenger

lacrane

Spirit Messenger (not actually trademarked) is a choose-your-own-adventure style digital conversation with a ghost and it is your goal to figure out the identity of the ghost and complete the conversation. The concept behind the project is to highlight the similarities of ghosts and the internet/technology. The project is hosted on a website, which is important to both the structure of the project and the idea that both ghosts and the internet are intangible systems. The story centers around Thomas Edison and his Spirit Phone from Natalie Zarrelli’s article “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone.” The article reports that in the late 1920s, Thomas Edison was working on a device that would detect personality-based residue and amplify the particles by the device like a human voice could be amplified and recorded by a phonograph. As technology has progressed, people have not abandoned the hope of finding evidence of ghosts and communicating with them. Ghost tracking apps are the modern and consumer friendly version of Edison’s invention. A common feature among the apps are scientific and analytical elements such as radars, negative image coloring, or loading bars. Spirit Messenger makes use of the radar at the beginning and delays the arrival of the “Begin Conversation” button in order to make the user feel as though the website is finding a nearby ghost to talk with.

The project was also inspired by Kate Pullinger’s “Breathe: A Ghost Story,” which is a story about a girl that can talk with ghosts and passages from her perspective are mixed with passages from a ghost’s perspective. The story is interactive in that it takes place on your smartphone, incorporates data using your IP address and camera, and requires you to move from page to page. Much of the invasiveness of the project comes from giving the site access to your phone’s camera which takes a picture of what is in front of you, for most users their bedroom at night. Spirit Messenger takes these ideas but elevates it to the next level by giving you a choice in what you want to say to the ghost, altering the path of the story. Spirit Messenger also takes data from your IP address at the beginning, because both ghosts and the internet share the quality of unexplainable omniscience and is jarring to have that information known without being consciously shared. The choose-your-own-adventure aspect was inspired out of the popularity of Netflix’s Black Mirror production “Bandernsatch.” The interactivity of selecting your response makes the experience more personal than Pullinger’s story. Like a conversation with another person or even ghost hunting technology on skittish ghosts, one wrong decision and the conversation can end.

Spirit Messenger is interactive because of the buttons clicked to make a response to a question the ghost asks. The ghost’s message appears and then the button appears, allowing the user to respond, a kind of controlled instant messaging system. The feel of instant messaging or text messaging is more comfortable than a phone call on Edison’s spirit phone might be or technology that captures supernatural audio. Part of that comfort is that text messaging is a part of our daily lives and allows for thrill under safe circumstances. The article “Insights into the Social and Psychological Effects of SMS Text Messaging” points out that the attractiveness of mobile messaging is its instant quality (1). This website has some minimal delay in typing to mimic the human delay in typing out a message, but it does not have the same kind of suspenseful waiting that ghost hunting technology has that requires waiting to see if there is a presence and if the presence will interact. The study also notes that text messaging provides “an opportunity for intimate personal contact whilst at the same time offering detachment” (Reid & Reid 3). This detachment is a large reason why the website does not elicit fear. Any fear or uneasiness felt comes from the suggestion that the messages are coming from a ghost and the eeriness that results from a failure of presence.

Mark Fisher’s article “The Weird and the Eerie” explains that “the sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or nothing present when there should be something” (61). Ghosts fall into the former category, and the ghost of Spirit Messenger feels present because the user does not know what it will say next, like a conversation with another person, but similar to a ghost in a haunted space the Spirit Messenger ghost is not visually or tangibly present. Perhaps the eeriest moment of the project is at the beginning when the viewer knows they are waiting for the technology to sense a ghost nearby. He also says that the eerie occurs in certain kinds of spaces, and technology is not traditionally one of those spaces. Movies like Personal Shopper are starting to play with the question of what would happen if a ghost could text and the idea of ghosts in non-traditional spaces. It is a new form of eerie. Ghosts are associated to the past and the vintage, but technology is constantly updating and representative of the now and even the future. It is not a space that ghosts would be expected or welcome. Chatbots, such as Cleverbot or Facebook Messenger, share this eerie feeling in a phenomenon called the uncanny valley. An article called “Chatbots Have Entered the Uncanny Valley” says that “as interacting with them approaches the experience of talking with another human, their robot-ness [or otherness] becomes accentuated” (Waddell par. 5). There is a strong parallel between the eeriness of ghosts and the uncanniness smart technology can have.

Speaking on the connection between ghosts and technologies in general, Heather Duncan says “Because the Spiritualist movement was so closely tied to the development of modern communications technologies, the same idea of energy and flow pervades our relationships with our electronic devices. When these devices malfunction, we experience the phenomenon of glitch, a disturbing disruption of flow that produces an uncanny sensation. Contemporary haunting narratives, particularly in film and in digital media, often play with the idea of the glitch as evidence of or as the entry point for a haunting. Glitches are disruptions in sensory data, reminding us that our technological devices do not really see or sense the way humans do, and, by corollary, might be able to sense entities or forces that we are unable to perceive” (2). During presentations when this website would crash or glitch, I would joke that the ghost was uninterested in continuing the conversation. Glitching is a form of death, in that the website is no longer live and functional. The lack of presence in communication technologies and from the beginning of communication technologies such as the telegraph, there has been an otherworldly sensation associated with communicating from beyond.

Kate Pullinger, in an article sharing her ideas behind “Breathe: A Ghost Story,” says “There’s a long tradition of haunted technology. People have always thought that the loom was haunted, or the printing press, the television, etc. It’s a theme that occurs again and again when it comes to stories about technology” (McMullan par. 4). Jeffrey Sconce in his book Haunted Media expands on this history between technology and the Spiritualist movement by recounting that soon after the invention of the telegraph, two young women known as the Fox sisters began hearing tapping from a spirit and would communicate by tapping back, a spiritual Morse code. He writes about the incident, “Certainly, the explicit connections between the two communications technologies were not lost on the Spiritualists themselves, who eagerly linked Spiritualist phenomena with the similarly fantastic discourses of electronic telegraphy” (24). This history establishes the connection between spiritualism and technology, and the Spirit Messenger project works to highlight the similarities between the internet and a ghost.

The internet’s physicality is a difficult subject to fully comprehend and it feels like disembodied energy floating in the air around us. The metaphor of The Cloud confirms this imagery, but the metaphor could easily be interchanged with The Ghost. Heather Duncan states that “we are entering an age where technology is bringing more and more nonhuman agents into our everyday lives and amplifying the glitchiness of what once seemed to be smooth, seamless surfaces of human experience” (141). While this may be taking more of the form of Amazon Alexas rather than ghosts, each give off the sense of the eerie because they are close to human because of their communication skills, but these nonhuman agents are always marked by being other, usually physically. Fisher suggests that the core enigma of the eerie is the question of its agency, and that the idea of agency forces us to reckon with purposes that are unknown (64). But the eerie also concerns the unknown, and ghosts and technology will always have elements that escape human knowledge or understanding. Ghosts share a lot of similarities with technology, so this project is an interesting experiment to see them entwined and dependent on each other in order to communicate to the viewer.

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