“The Oracle said, beware the networked screen”

This is the opening line in Sarah Boo’s Virtual Spectres, a video piece which seems to be simultaneously mourning the lost potentials of digital technology, and the lost versions of ourselves which might have been, had things played out differently. Its rolling, shapeshifting dialogue gives voice to the ghosts in our machines; lamenting their fate under neoliberalism, and both grieving for and condemning their users in turn. Their ghostly, disembodied screens and x-ray transparent machine bodies run endless, arcane circuits within a black but still highly charged void, both purgatorial and hellish. Quietly raging like greek Furies, their tongues welded together.

This is already more classical allusions than I would normally dare to use, but in the case of Virtual Spectres it feels fitting. The work, while effortlessly contemporary, (as Boo’s work so often is) still manages to channel something of ancient myth. Or perhaps more accurately, ancient myth as reimagined via the gothic. Mournful ghosts speak to the cruelty of the fates, their words and haunting gazes piercing the veil of the screen. Giving the viewer/user a glimpse into a digital underworld, where the dead are not at rest.

The work alludes to earlier forms of the net, and digital technology more generally. Forms which have been fully supplanted, recuperated, by capitalism, but whose presences still linger. And in their lingering, their haunting of our current networks, they remind us painfully of what the net briefly was and could have been. They speak, part lament and part warning, of the connections we have lost, as well as of the shambling, empty husks of that connection which still surround us. Like Marley’s ghost, giving Scrooge a glimpse of the chains which await him, Boo’s Virtual Spectres display for us their grim, silent march through the void.

Infinite connection, but zero communality. Forever in sight of other souls, but unable to speak to or touch them. Resigned to merely shuffle behind and ahead of them, just out of arm's reach, until we too are fully extracted. Made spectres.

It is a work very much about grief, not so much for the potential technologies and networks we never got, (even though it is their voices which confront us) but rather for the version of ourselves who would have used and been shaped by them. Or perhaps, what Virtual Spectres is really grieving, is the versions of us who would have fought harder to make them happen in the first place. The us who had heard the spectres’ warnings before it was too late; before our fates were sealed by the empty threads of Capital’s ever spinning wheel.

There is no clear answer, or perhaps too many answers; which is fitting for a work which begins by evoking the Oracle. The piece also speaks in many voices, many perspectives, which shift and flow in almost dreamlike fashion. It has an amorphous yet captivating looseness of space, time and identity which itself perfectly exemplifies the digital and its potentials; and uses this to offer up a warning. One which is both too late and still desperately relevant. It is, in short, a haunting work well worth being haunted by.