Shadow Creatures. From Spirit Photography to the Ghosts of the Algorithm

HAUNTED BY THE UNSEEN

Specters haunt digital images: algorithmic creatures loom in photorealistic video-games, cryptids nest in datasets, and AI prompts bring ghostly figures to the scene.

Shadow Creatures traces a long arc from the spirit photography of the nineteenth century to today’s algorithmic phantoms to illustrate how images can conjure up beings that inhabit our personal, social, and political subconscious. It redirects our gaze from the promises of light to the shadows in which the spectral and nonhuman inform our perspectives on images and our shared visions.

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Commissioner: Fotomuseum Winterthur + Kutxa Foundation
Editors: Marco De Mutiis, Rea Grünenfelder
Publisher: Distanz
Book photography: Arnau Rovira

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Editorial

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English edition

The catalogue illuminates how algorithmic processes engender distinctive ghostly apparitions that blur the boundaries between code, imagination, and projection. The book design extends this exploration, engaging with the tension between what appears real and what remains unseen.

The exhibition brings together works by Cihad Caner, Nina Davies, Tomokichi Fukurai, Sung Chi-Li, William H. Mumler & Helen F. Stuart, Trevor Paglen, Mario Santamaría, Janne Schimmel, Steph Maj Swanson, Shannon Taggart, Agate Tūna and Sheung Yiu, as well as contributions by students from the Master of Arts in Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI).

With essays by the curators Rea Grünenfelder and Marco De Mutiis as well as by Matteo Bittanti, Deirdre de la Cruz, Dortje Fink, Arianna Forte, Bogna Konior, Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo, Johny Pitts, Shih-Lun Chang, Shannon Taggart, Jon Uriarte, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Sheung Yiu.

Euskera/Spanish edition

[Tech Spec]

Softcover (Otabind) with dust jacket
220 × 300 mm
292 pages, 180 color images
Offset Print
2 editions (English + Spanish/Euskera)
Printed by Druckhaus Sportflieger (Germany)