Ignis Fatuus (Ghost Light)

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one. Détournement is the opposite of quotation...” 1 "The 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.” (Fisher)‘The flat eclecticism of the New Aesthetic and the Post-Internet generation—an endlessly multifarious universe that comes prequantified into discrete and isomorphic tumblr thumbnails.’ 2 Ignis Fatuus conjures ghostly echoes and disturbing undercurrents in contemporary life, a dark parallax to the perception of social media as a benign creative space of opportunity and friendship.Text is collaged with a staccato montage of subliminal images and cinematic fragments; the hyper-detritus of consumer capitalism over scored with an unsettling soundtrack of glitch and rupture.The ghost, rather than supernatural relic of a primitive age, is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the modern world. Immateriality and spectrality are axiomatic to the digital realms we inhabit. Life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. Everything that was once directly lived is now haunted by itself. 1The Society of the Spectacle, Debord, G, 19672Speculative Aesthetics, (Mackay, Pendrell and Trafford), 2014