To Vanish, to Return, to Withdraw: Ghostly Motions of Digital Visuality and the Self

Abstract

From ghost imaging in scientific research to the phantasmatic images produced by artificial intelligence, the metaphor of the ghost – along with related notions such as apparition, disappearance, trace, spectralization, and evanescence – offers a crucial interpretive framework for understanding digital culture. This metaphor is especially relevant in the visual and communicative domains, where the idea of apparition is increasingly replacing that of representation. This shift updates a long tradition of visual theory, from ancient distinctions like eidolon and phantasma to the postmodern revival of the simulacrum. The ghost becomes a productive figure through which to rethink the nature and status of digital images: unstable, fleeting, and often uncanny. The essay explores how contemporary media practices – especially on social platforms – mobilize ghost-like dynamics: ghosting, automated memory, the return of inactive profiles, and the persistence of digital traces. These phenomena blur conventional boundaries between analog and digital, real and virtual, presence and absence. By approaching images as spectral entities, the digital can be seen not simply as a space of virtualization, but as a site of phantasmatisation – where images no longer just represent, but haunt, reappear, and resist clear definition.

Keywords

• self
• ghost
• visual culture
• digital images
• social media