Shadow Creatures: From Spirit Photography to the Ghosts of the Algorithm

From nineteenth-century spirit photography to AI cryptids, Shadow Creatures explores the specters embedded in algorithmic images.

Specters haunt digital images: algorithmic creatures loom in photorealistic video games, cryptids nest in datasets, and AI prompts bring ghostly figures to the scene. Shadow Creatures traces a long arc from the spirit photography of the nineteenth century to today’s algorithmic phantoms to illustrate how images can conjure up beings that inhabit our personal, social, and political subconscious. It redirects our gaze from the promises of light to the shadows in which the spectral and nonhuman inform our perspectives on images and our shared visions.

Featuring work by artists such as Cihad Caner, Sheung Yiu, and Nina Davies, this catalogue illuminates how algorithmic processes engender distinctive ghostly apparitions that blur the boundaries between code, imagination, and projection. The book design extends this exploration, engaging with the tension between what appears real and what remains unseen. With essays by curators Rea Grünenfelder and Marco De Mutiis, as well as by Matteo Bittanti, Deirdre de la Cruz, Dortje Fink, Arianna Forte, Bogna Konior, Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo, Johny Pitts, Shih-Lun Chang, Shannon Taggart, Jon Uriarte, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Sheung Yiu.

Marco De Mutiis works as a digital curator at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Rea Grünenfelder is a curatorial assistant at the Fotomuseum Winterthur.