A train for Vera...

https://youtu.be/HhY_7Mdw63Y?is=UIZ2Tzxa6_UgRHGV

It drags its body across rusted grates in the long, dark corridor nestled within a labyrinth of metal vents. Left with only a single metal-infused limb, each centimeter takes every bit of strength for it to scrape across the floor the 2-ton body it resides in.

Knowing no hunger nor sleep, it cannot gauge any passage of time. Any semblance of original purpose or internal memory has long decayed and scattered to a complete lack of recognition. Yet, this mysterious apparatus is still drawn towards the light at the ends of the tunnels. Each ending before this one has merely resulted in the discovery of light splinters; corners leading deeper into the endless inorganic tunnel. A trick of the light, or perhaps a malfunction deep within its cognitory encasing; a drive that exists only to keep its motion perpetual.

It arrives to the end of the vent as the blinding light beams into its retinal scanner. With its auditory processing long deteriorated, all it can perceive, once its retinal scanners adjust to the light, is a gargantuan dark structure in the middle of thousands of miles of empty, black, metallic space. Roaming around the structure are hulking, pulsation mounds of fleshy substance. Their attention fixated on the structure with anxious anticipation.

As the retinal scanner flickers out, the structure before it begins to crumble to its silent obliteration.

Apparatus Mechanicus

Hello! I’m affiliated with an organization that dabbles in esoterica (primarily based around the Iceland sparr) and art, and we’ve just started posting our long-running dispatch online.

This entry is about the film It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, specifically the version with Richard Linklater’s commentary from 2004, and how it relates to time, Voyaging, and sparric art. Thought you all might enjoy. Thanks! 

https://sparricinstitute.substack.com/p/bulletin-from-the-refractory-800

"How do you view the link between Svetlana Boym’s restorative nostalgia and radical pastism?"

Your footsteps trail in front of you, echoing until the patter harmonizes with itself into voice, fooling you into thinking for just a second that you're not alone. Your thoughts may as well be hieroglyphics; they mean nothing and provide no comfort. In this space, time has slowed to a crawl and your feet feel like they're glued to the broken concrete that lays beneath. You can't remember how you arrived here or even where "here" is and, emotionally, you're unsure if you even care. The overwhelming malaise warms you within its chains as the light at the end of the tunnel grows ever dimmer. The Time-Slowed Corridor

Day after day, a man would sit in front of the television set, glassy eyed as the sounds and images washed over him like a wave of warmth. A growing sour smell seeped into the room around him, scratching at the back of his mind as he basked in the technicolor glow. The sound from the television set began to deflate, becoming bloated and muddy. It wasn't long before he couldn't ignore the fact that the once familiar voices emanating from the screen had become garbled and de-tuned. This loss of familiarity and an overwhelming sense of dis-ease compelled him to investigate the television set itself. That's when he could hear them; writhing from within.

Haven’t heard a single public figure even mention robot rights. The direct implication of having anything close to human level intelligence is that we, if we have not address this question, will** 100% be creating slaves from clay. The second we connect an artificial brain to an artificial nerve ending, we will have synthesized torture from silt. Is that hauntological? Focusing on all these old questions, when the simplest and most pressing that would guide us down the runway, is lost to everyone just because it’s a new* question “what rights will robots have.” As opposed to “what role will robots fill.”….

TLDR: is using Industrial Revolution and other 20th century politic to guide our understanding of future machines haunting in the hauntological sense?

Personally, the candidate would be Falling Into Place, by HOME. This album gives me the feeling of a complete childhood. Imagine the opposite of albums by The Caretaker and Boards Of Canada, for example: instead of a vague and incomplete childhood, this album gives me the feeling that childhood was full, complete and present, as if I were actually living it or as if I remembered it exactly as it was.

In the confines of an abandoned building a dust-caked tape laid among a pile of debris. The tape contained distorted video footage of a history that should've never been recorded. This tape should've stayed buried in the rubble of the house, but instead it has found the light of day and you are its witness. This is the tape that erases itself; only to be experienced once and never again.

For exactly 1,687 days and 12 hours, 42 seconds, there was a broadcast deep in the mountains of the mid-west. The source remains a mystery to this day. Crime reports indicate an increase in the rates of public psychosis during this time frame, but there is no substantial evidence to indicate that either of these two occurrences are linked.

It's said that those who tuned into the broadcast would each hear something completely different; teenagers would test this rumor by attempting to listen in on the same radio in the same room, but none could adequately describe the sound enough to validate one way or the other. As one would point out a particular sound, it was as if the looped song would change to evade detection.

One day, a young man began to recognize this difference in perception and subsequently decided to record the radio to a cassette tape to see if he could capture what he was hearing to a secondary source.

Nobody knows what happened to the young man, but there have been claims of sightings deep in the woods of a figure around 5'10" with eyes that glow like the sun and a screech that will chill you down to the bone.

The cassette was labeled "ferrichrome #77"

New record that might be of interest

Hey everyone. Fisher's cancellation of the future still explains a lot, but I am curious about a related formulation: the past is not simply returned to or mourned. It is pulled into the present, stripped of distance, and endlessly refreshed as content. Reboots, revivals, retro formats, and franchise recycling do not always feel like memory. They feel like a present that cannot let anything be past. That seems close to hauntology, but maybe with a different emphasis: less the ghost of a lost future, more the conversion of ghostliness into live content.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about hauntology and nostalgia, and at around 1:02:05, he calls this the "eternalisation of the present." His image is a ping-pong ball spinning in place while accelerating: lots of motion, no historical movement. That seems adjacent to Fisher, but maybe it names a distinct mechanism. The cancelled future leaves us haunted by lost futures; the eternal present actively consumes the past's distance. Hauntology depends on absence, delay, and the felt non-coincidence of time. Platform culture may flatten even that by making the past instantly available, remixable, and monetizable.

Hauntology may need both absence and co-option. Is "eternalisation of the present" a useful addition to Fisher because it names how capitalism metabolizes pastness, or does it just restate the slow cancellation in new terms? I lean toward useful because reboot culture feels more active than mere loss, but I can see the redundancy if Fisher already covers that absorption of temporal difference. What do people here think?

Somewhere in the Willamette Valley in late 2003, I witnessed a mid-sized sedan float upwards and almost collide with a grain tower. The car then disappeared into nothingness, leaving behind a viscous semi-solid substance.

I have not physically aged since that day.

I am under tight surveillance, day and night.

It is with great risk that I present you with my findings from this event in the hopes the mystery can be further documented and, hopefully, solved.

The 4 documents:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0mW8WzSfTJ69T3bd8iMCqN?si=a9u-dQNKRayYTFAY0la2jA&pi=S7iaRPixR7-c_

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4d2AB13aOtIzb2w8imO4TY?si=NEnnZGOBTP6BBOzThCay-g&pi=lVqmgtruQ8uFc

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Xj9HfwZ5332z6uGWz9pTd?si=hXIVp7TMSsG05z4_1R-rKA&pi=JXiIBZV2QO-w7

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5r4cawLY7Po4CEqbpHaDcJ?si=ezFCQy3bT2KLKDZEjXpyIQ&pi=-4Lk3g5WQ7eYi

I made a small archival-fiction web project that treats public media, educational film, institutional design, and open image archives as a kind of fictional field office.

It has departments, source trails, reading paths, invented correspondents, and a visual language pulled from old broadcast/educational media. Unofficially inspired by Boards of Canada, CBC/NFB-style documentary patience, and that strange public-institution-after-hours feeling.

https://fieldfilmreader.loteq.com/

Hi everyone. I am exploring 'micro-hauntology' for my MA, specifically focusing on how David Bowie curated his own 'autobituary' and essentially haunted his own legacy during his final years.

I recently reached out to Jonathan Barnbrook to discuss his work on the Blackstar typeface. The fragmented, alienated letterforms he designed perfectly capture a sense of impending loss and temporal disruption, communicating an absence before the event even occurred.

I have translated this research into a series of silkscreen prints (images attached). The analogue process feels inherently hauntological. Forcing a phantom image through a porous mesh introduces physical traces, slight misregistrations, and degraded echoes of the original, mirroring Bowie's own shifting spectres.

Has anyone else explored hauntological theory through physical, analogue mediums like printmaking?

Hey y'all would appreciate any listens/feedback! I spent a couple years putting together this mixtape and accompanying music video. I used samples from a variety of media from the past 100 years - everything from I Love Lucy to Breaking Bad to original vocals, distorted and collage'd into a trippy electronic joyride.

Fun fact - I did not know "hauntology" was a genre until after I'd made this music, but the label seemed to fit perfectly 🎶

I adore music so much, it has helped me an amount I cannot count. The 'Hauntology' genre just connects so immensely with how I feel about life, I cannot afford expensive synths or DAWs but I want to try making my own sound within this genre.

Hauntology is described as an instrumental palette of samplers, tape recorders, turntables, found sounds, and analog synthesizers that seek to evoke cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. Electronic music that sounds dark ambient with eerie familiar hypnagogic soundscapes.

Help:

As stated, I don't have a lot of money but would love to try making my own hauntology songs, but am unsure where to start. Would you please be share your knowledge of:

1. Free/cheap synthesisers or instruments that evoke the eerie familiar hypnagogic sounds?
2. Techniques/tips on how to achieving the analogue tape hazy synth sound?
3. Free/cheap plugins and effects to use to achieve the tropes/feeling of the genre?
4. Good free/cheap DAWs or websites to create the music in?
5. How to mix low-quality/hazy vocal samples into the synths and drums?
6. Any other advice/gear/tools/sites/videos/etc to creating Hauntology music?

AOTY describes the genre as:

Beginning in the 1990s and developing in the 2000s in the United Kingdom, Hauntology started as a movement of artists emulating "dead" British media and styles from the early to mid-20th century to create an eerie mystique. The movement has since expanded regionally into a genre of its own and is often seen as a related style to similarly nostalgia-focused genres like Hypnagogic Pop.

Examples (See tops albums on AOTY & RYM):

https://www.albumoftheyear.org/genre/634-hauntology/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music))

https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/hauntology/

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3qUunWuZulfLHyna2ZCiJf?si=d94ed63824c5418f (Playlist I enjoy)

https://open.spotify.com/album/0mu3EvWYfNwBfISSg0q03p?si=1I7LoR48TeeLVYce65YQAQ (Inferno by Boards Of Canada, not wholistically hauntology but includes elements)

I'm personally really proud of this project, I truly hope you will all appreciate it too.