by: Perry Hoberman
"Faraday's Ghost" is a digital analog of an earlier piece entitled "Faraday's Garden". In "Faraday's Garden", participants walked through a landscape of innumerable household and office appliances, triggering power tools, projectors, radios, phonographs, and various other personal comfort devices. Now, in "Faraday's Ghost", these machines have been replaced by the single device that has superceded them all: the digital computer. The appliances are displayed as images seen in isolation against a jet black background. By scanning various bar code patterns (which function as "ghosts" of the electrical circuits and fields that previously linked the devices), users are able to momentarily switch on the virtual appliances. "Faraday's Garden" stripped the appliances of their original functions as useful objects; "Faraday's Ghost" strips them of their physical presence altogether.
