I am ten years old. I am looking inside of my computer screen, browsing my favourite creepypasta forum. As always, I return to my favourite story . One is an image of a dog with human teeth. Usually, I would read through the tale too afraid to look at the picture at the end of the article. The ‘Smile Dog’ was, after all, fabled to cause a lifetime of nightmares and seizures for the viewer, lest they pass the image onto someone else. Today is different, though. Today I scroll down, today I choose to be greeted with the dog with the human teeth. It looks at me through the screen and I look back at it. The story told me that, now, it would jump from behind the screen and into my dreams. That the flat image
That night I do not sleep. I look at my curtain pole, eyes wide with terror, a body unsure of what my dreams will now contain.
I am twenty three years old. I am attending a screening of We’re All Going To The World’s Fair at BFI Southbank. There are five other people there, all older and all expecting a horror film. One of them leaves. Casey, the film’s protagonist, enters into an ARG style game: The World’s Fair challenge. She expresses that she often feels isolated, that she does not feel that she can relate to other people. Inside of the computer, she attempts to find community through horror, she attempts to mend her isolation with performance. She emeshes herself into the computer, the line between her body’s end and the screens beginning blurred.
The internet was haunted again, through the cinema screen I could feel that same fear I had as a child.
What does it mean for an image to be haunted? If ghosts have unfinished business in the world, how does this transfer to the internet, into a screen? A screen is a thin piece of glass, separating a physical world from an online one, a space which is just as much of a space as one with tangible moving parts. If the images inside of a screen are not seen as tactile, then how can a haunting occur? Ghosts, those caught between realms of living and dead, cannot exist unless they have space to occupy, unless they have somewhere to grab a hold of. If an image can be haunted, does this not also suggest that we can conceptualise the internet as space? That we can see these areas which exist only due to codes and digits as real places which we must conceptualise in order to actualise the hauntings depicted within them. If we begin to understand ‘the internet’ not in abstract notions, but in terms of tactility, fluidity, in terms of all the same conditions one would apply to material space, then we can begin to understand the digital spaces which we al occupy.