I currently teach a graduate seminar series through the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis as part of their Core Curriculum in the academic years 2023-2024, 2024-2025, and 2025-206. The course is on histories of technologies and their entanglements with spectrality, esoterism, and spirituality.

Who are we really interacting with when we chat with a bot? What lurks behind the interface of AI? What drives the anthropomorphic understanding of machines as intelligent beings? The course approaches AI from a media archaeological perspective, and studies media histories that might help us understand the medium of AI, such as chat-based AI like ChatGPT, Bard, Replika, Insomnobot-3000, and beyond.

The course departs from the idea that what algorithms feed forward to us in our present and future is always built on the past, where literal and metaphorical ghosts and traces return to haunt our digital medium. The term ‘medium’, as Jeffrey Sconce reminds us in Haunted Media (2000), refers to both medium as mediation as well as medium as spirit contact. In the seminar sessions, we read together contemporary literature on AI as well media-archaeological accounts to identify these literal and metaphorical ghosts. For instance, we take a closer look at minor histories in the invention of technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone and explore their intertwinement with ghost and spirit communication in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sessions include:

  • The Media Archaeological Method: On Medium and Mediumship
  • On Bots, Turing Tests, and Spiritualist Séances
  • On the Networked Home and its Horror Narratives
  • On Hauntology, Spectral Justice, and Race
  • Artistic interventions and reflections