Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine' combines the 19th-century optical mechanics of Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844–1918) and ‘astronomical’ time into a moving image system that projects reconstructed movements of a ghost gleaned from an early 20th-century film, The Magical Press. This work emerged from reflecting on the constant motion of the earth’s orbit around the sun. On a sunny afternoon when the sun was halfway between autumn and winter, a circle of light moved across Deirdre's studio wall. The quivering luminous shape, reflected from a water glass, moved slowly to the right, gradually vanishing. This moving image of light, created by the earth’s rotation around the sun was a visual reminder of the concept of time derived from earth’s orbit constantly in motion and how this continuous flux of light and shadow is transmuted into time as a form of structure and measurement, its units of minutes, hours and days forever passing us by.