Opinion: Life within Dark Media

By Pramod K Nayar Media are conduits for communication between A and B. The very idea of a conduit for communication presupposes not just the possibility of a connection but a prior disconnection. Thus, A communicates with B, because A and B are disconnected, individual and separate. One of the uses that media forms like […]

By Pramod K Nayar

Media are conduits for communication between A and B. The very idea of a conduit for communication presupposes not just the possibility of a connection but a prior disconnection. Thus, A communicates with B, because A and B are disconnected, individual and separate.

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One of the uses that media forms like photography were put to was to communicate with and connect to things not immediately visible to the human. Societies dedicated to psychical research across 19^th century Europe tried to capture ghosts and spirits. The series of Paranormal Activity, Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project and Conjuring films are actually a hark-back to that era. Filming ghosts, aliens, ‘presences’ and demons possessing humans is an integral aspect of media, strange as that may sound.

Media Presences

The ghost on camera is a media presence, if one could play on the very idea of ‘media presences’. The camera then is a medium that connects humans to the nonhuman in a case of extreme communication.

Vague shapes, auras and the play of light are projected as ‘presences’ that have been unwittingly captured. The medium then is the evidence of paranormal activity and nonhuman, even divine/demonic presences. This insistence on the medium as a connection and communication between the human and the supernatural leads media theorist and literary studies scholar Eugene Thacker to call such devices ‘Dark Media’. As Thacker defines it, Dark Media enables ‘the relation between the human and the nonhuman, but a nonhuman that is not necessarily outside the human or separate from it’.

The Omen films made the camera and the photograph the first clues pointing to the presence of something unthinkable. All the pictures starring Damien Thorn would have a black shadow or smudge hovering in it, like a cloud, and people put it down to a flaw in the emulsion or just a bad camera angle.

But the fact is that the medium literally brings the other-world into the picture. The ‘other’ is a presence made available only through the medium designed to capture human presences. This is the ghost in the machine, or the machine that captures the ghost sitting, quietly, next to you on that chair. The ghost too gets its share of media presence and attention, apparently.

Haunting Media

Then of course there are instances where the medium itself is a possessive spirit, the source of a haunting. Arguably the most famous popular representations of the haunted medium would be the Ring series, based on the Japanese Koji Suzuki’s fiction.

Here the video cassette is the medium that conveys the ghost into the lives of the viewers, killing them. The cassette then transmits the ghost — and the films have sequences of the ghost climbing out of the TV screen when the video is played, to get at the viewer — into the present. The haunting here is enabled by technology — which reaches across spaces, people and time to capture and kill.

In other words, the medium is a medium of haunting. The tape or the camera is a material medium that brings what has hitherto been treated as the non-material and the ghostly. That is, the non-material ghostly is vivified through the device and the technology. The medium gives the non-material and the non-human a form, with which it can emerge into the world of the humans.

There is another aspect to the Dark Media. The camera and the cassette, the tape and the screen take us into a whole world otherwise not accessible by our (human) senses. This means to say, the camera or device serves as a prosthesis to our senses when extending into another realm. It serves as an affirmation that, even though our senses are limited by our bodies, the devices we invent and employ extend far beyond the bodies, even into the realm of the unseeable.

Inhuman Media

The Ring series (Ring, Spiral, Loop) also undertakes to present the medium as a virus. The Ring Virus is conflated mysteriously with the small pox virus – small pox, supposedly eradicated decades ago. The virus is transmitted through a video tape when played, and produces a tumour that then kills the viewer-victim. (In the sequel, Spiral, a report on the mystery itself becomes the enabling environment for the virus.)

In an age of flourishing informatised bodies, the human and the nonhuman merge so that all living matter itself becomes biomedia (an earlier Thacker work of the same title), with living tissue crossed with informational technology and information coded into biological matter — which is already the case with DNA, of course — as explored in literary texts like that of the American novelist Richard Powers.

The camera, the screen, the webcam, the recording device are not distinct from the living matter we occupy. They serve as the medium through which the virus enters the living matter, as in Ring. All media then has the potential to be inhuman media, not in the sense of being necessarily anti-human, but incorporating the non-human with and into the human.

This also means the non-living object is no longer to be seen as the ‘other’ of the human, but as integral to us, to our senses, our perceptions of the world and ourselves. The medium constitutes us, and is a component of our consciousness which we have believed was our ‘own’ but which we now know is mediated already.

Dark media then is not a medium that captures the sinister, it is what enables us to see the objects in the dark.

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