Vectorplasm
A bizarre new substance has entered the world.
It is an invisible liquid made of ghosts.
It is appearing everywhere now, although we cannot see it, it is beginning to determine much of what we do see. Like some sentient goo, it seems to have a mind of its own, but this too is an illusion. It works autonomously, and in ways even its creators don’t fully understand, but it is a kind of human parasite, regurgitating endless amalgamations of everything, as it feeds on us. It conjures uncanny new forms from the graveyards of our culture, but unlike other types of ghost or apparition, these spectres were never alive to begin with.
Let us call this weird new matter “Vectorplasm”
AI as Virtual Ectoplasm
Vectorplasm: Virtual / vector-based “ectoplasm” – from Barthes’ use of the word in photography theory. Vectorplasm is a digital miasma from which ghosts appear or are constructed. Vectorplasm is the raw material of generative AI. It consists of vectorised data, random noise and a large language model of some kind, working together to generate new outputs from learned patterns and chaos, such as in denoising diffusion.
Spectral photographic traces and information from the past are garbled and reformed into new simulacra out of vectoplasm. We only become aware of vectoplasm’s underlying spectrality when we encounter the uncanny, glitches, or other unexplained phenomena in its outputs.
Vectorplasm isn’t an ontological category or any easily identifiable part of a given generative system, but a hauntological symptom of the hallucinatory way such a system behaves as a whole.
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In attempting to recreate ectoplasm and spirit photography, using these models, the project floats this weird spectral substance to the surface. Previous investigations with AI, such as /imagine Ronsack and The Jettison began to show it seeping through the cracks. In these new works we can clearly see how one trace liquidizes and metamorphosizes into another, as each apparition becomes the seed for the next, creating a series of terrifying digital mutations.
Medium
Generative AI / Photography / Animation
Year
2025
Not a Soul
Building on the Vectorplasm series to create new moving image works. In these re-animated simulations of spirit photography, the “spirit” is missing. None of these were once real people, so they aren’t ghosts in the traditional sense, even as they emerge from data haunted by such images. The machinic and soulless creation of such apparitions somehow seems even more horrifying, The lack of real people extending to the entire automatic process of generation, and pointing towards the possibility that such virtual ghouls could be reanimated spontaneously by AI, for an audience of nobody at all.
