Archive 81 is a 2022 Netflix series developed by Rebecca Sonnenshine based upon the podcast of the same name created by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger (which I have not listened to as of yet, so cannot compare in this article).
Its premise follows the recruitment of Dan Turner (Mamadoudou Athie) as an electronic media conservator tasked with restoring fire-damaged videotapes shot by missing…
Delia Derbyshire ~ The Myths and The Legendary Tapes: Film Review
Delia Derbyshire ~ The Myths and The Legendary Tapes: Film Review
Back in the infancy of Folk Horror Revival, myself and fellow founding member Darren Charles cut our teeth on the live talk scene on behalf of FHR, delivering a lecture to the Alchemical Landscapes symposium at Girton College, Cambridge Univerity. In those hallowed halls we dedicated our talk to two luminaries of sound – Cambridge town’s own madcap Syd Barrett (as it was on the anniversary of his…
Some scientists have formed theories about space and time. They create special equipment that will help them experiment with time by traveling to another dimension.
If they arrive in another dimension, that world may be very much like our own, but certain parts of it may be very different. The scientists themselves may be different when they arrive. That is why they must be careful about which special equipment they use.
Science For Middle School Jean Brainard, Julie Sandeen
Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present – a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat of extinction. Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress. […] Ghosts, too, are weeds that whisper tales of the many pasts and yet-to-comes that surround us. […] Worlds have ended many times before. Endings come with the death of a leaf, […] the death of a friendship, the death of small promises and small stories. […] Whereas Progress trained us to keep moving forward, to look up to an apex at the end of a horizon, ghosts show us multiple unruly temporalities. […]
Some kinds of lives stretch beyond our ken, and for us, they also offer a ghostly radiance.
The lichen that grows on tombstones is one example.
Every autumn, mycologist Anne Pringle goes to the Petersham Cemetery near Boston to trace the outline of individual lichens, watching their growth on the gravestones of local residents and dignitaries. They grow slowly, and sometimes some disappear. Some are probably the same individuals as those that first found a place to settle when those dignitaries died centuries ago.
For fleeting creatures such as ourselves, lichens are more-than-ghosts of the past and the yet-to-come.
Lichens are symbiotic assemblages of species: filamentous fungi and photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. Lichens are themselves a kind of landscape […]. Many filamentous fungi are potentially immortal. This does not mean they cannot be killed […]. Until cut off by injury, they spread in networks of continually renewed filaments. When we notice their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of a different kind of livability.
Many kinds of time – of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and Western colonialism – meet on the gravestones of Petersham. The ghosts of multispecies landscapes disturb our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing leading to another. […]
These temporal feats alert us that the time of modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters.
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Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.
