Generally this past week I have continued finding material for the archive. A good resource for visual content I found that I liked is science70.tumblr.com, who has their own YouTube channel, in which they combine old, eclectic clips from the 50s to 80s in their entirety with other clips. They include original sources of the clips in all their videos, which is helpful in finding more material. While speaking with Kai about these findings, he brought up the topic of Hauntology, which is a term I was not familiar with at the time. There seems to be some journals published on it in academia. In an article by Mark Fisher titled “What Is Hauntology?”, he states

What defined this ‘hauntological’ confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.

The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.

Mark Fisher – What Is Hauntology?

I think I keep revolving around this idea of a dystopian future in regards to the theme of the mainframe project because with the more materials I compiled, it became evident that there has and always will be a desire for an improved and efficient way of living, however there is no escaping the way in which all suffer on a day to day basis. Somehow technology exists both as a tool to make our lives easier, and yet it also makes it easier to destroy said life.

“We construct our technologies, and our technologies construct us and our times. Our times make us, we make our machines, our machines make our times. We become the object we look upon but they become what we make of them”

Margaret M. Lloyd, There, yet not there: Human relationships with technology, 2010