Machine Ghosts
Haunted Random Forest Festival
Brighton, UK
2017

This artwork took the form of a multisensory walk through more-than-human histories that I designed with Emma O'Sullivan for the Haunted Random Forest Festival. We imagined an urban rendezvous with machines, that invited participants to explore Brighton as an algorithmic playground, revealing hidden and obstructed histories of the city’s lesser-known entities. We were inspired by the critical, anti-authoritarian strategies of the Situationist International group of 1950s Europe known for hosting dérives or “drifts”, a method for engaging with cities like Paris through psychogeographic walks that explored the emotional impacts of urban environments on individuals. Drawing from this tradition, our ghost nodes exposed moments of access, control and liberation with the walk’s 30 participants, exploring tales of the machines, networks and algorithms hidden across the city’s urban infrastructures. The activities of the Machine Ghosts tour were featured on Furtherfield.