On “haunted” and “weird” media…

Posted on | November 29, 2017 | No Comments

From Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2013) by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark…

Whereas haunted media expressed the mediation of the supernatural in positive terms, with weird media mediation only indicates a gulf or abyss between two ontological orders. Sometimes the supernatural is present but not apparent (e.g., an invisible creature that never- theless exists within our same reality, but outside the visible spectrum). At other times the supernatural is apparent but not present (e.g., unnamable entities from other dimensions). (133)

To summarize: media are “haunted” when they affirmatively mediate between two different ontological orders, and by trans- forming the object into a divine object (the artifact or the por- tal). By contrast, media are “weird” when they negatively medi- ate between two ontological orders, whereby the object recedes into a thing. (133-134)

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