ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of machines in repeating and reproducing figures, motifs and fictions and the relationship between phantasms and new digital technologies. It examines the use of digitalization of photographs to produce, track and understand the passages of ghosts and phantasms. The chapter addresses digital archives and social machines which document and account for ghost experiences and the political effects of this. It reviews machines and the transmission of data, information and images. The chapter introduces the idea of new social machines and the kinds of socialities that emerge from them. The 'machinic' transmission of the ethereal experience has gained a huge amount of social power, through the global transmission and re-use of images of haunting. The chapter explains new ways of thinking about digital collections of the dead and of ghosts which is then pursued by thinking about archiving 'images' of the dead and the social effects of this in terms of record-keeping, grief and social memory.
