“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…”

Doris Chu’s Search History presents a screenshot image of a browser history, which contains within it the echoes of a (possibly final) conversation between two unknown souls. Partial and disjointed, this conversation has the undeniable subtext of former lovers, no longer together but still, at least in this abstract moment, in contact. Specifically, this contact is indirect, mediated by both the means of online platforms and by a deeper underlying gulf; one of both time and memory, and the unavoidable distances which those create. It is not in fact a true conversation at all, but merely the lingering traces of an unknown breadth of time’s digital interactions, each informed by both participants’ internal and external worlds, but unable to capture the details of those worlds except by soft inferences and the universality of experiences everyone alive in the digital age have at one time had.

It is a post hoc conversation, held between an unknown subject and the online specter of their once lover. It is ghostly, not in the sense of the modern day haunted house, but rather the gothic villa; its study lit late into the night by the haunted poet, their dead lover’s visage crouched in the flickering shadows. At the same time, it is uniquely of the now, telling a story of digital connection and loss, and presented through a material form that simply did not exist even a generation ago. It’s Poe’s Lenore, invoked not by the fantastical mockery of the raven, but by the banality of the browser window; its content dredged up not from beyond the veil, but rather the inhuman memory of unseen corporate servers.

Like several of the works we’ve already explored as a part of Ghosted, Chu’s work touches on something universal and timeless, its power once ascribed to the supernatural or ritualistic, but now made frighteningly literal by its intersection with digital technology. The lost lover’s ghost, the mournful memory of relationships past, are no longer merely the realm of human memory and metaphoric tales of the macabre. The traces of our online interactions, which are increasingly central to our relationships, genuinely do linger on in snippets of code that are beyond our reach or control. Through the digital we can be haunted like never before, and Search History captures this revelation with a simultaneous complexity and economy that is truly befitting its form.