I am haunted. Haunted by tales of electronically-charged change. Haunted by promises of formlessness, disguise, hidden identity. I can't shake the longing to 'beam up,' to pass through time and form, to function like a charged-up device without a shell.

I am haunted by devices. Like a problem child carrying a blanket, I drag the device everywhere, stuffed in my pocket, clutched in my hand, inserted in my ear, [wondering about other options…]. I speak to my devices. I hold them, I push all their buttons.

My devices are haunted. These things that I carry project voices and words. I listen for their call. [They don't seem human.] What is this thing that wants to get out?

The haunting of devices drifts through and collapses time, imbuing the present with presence. Technology structuring history with radical shifts. Miniaturized and ubiquitous, it spins the head of Benjamin's angel.

My devices haunt houses and highways and horizons, endowing place with a new sense of space. They are here and there, and somehow nowhere. They create a new here where I am there.

This haunting makes a sound. It crackles in the air. Snaps and buzzes and hums. It even seems to make the silence. Silent movement, buzzing paths, humming networks, crackling connections, snapping disconnections.

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In my current research and artwork, I consider questions of subjectivity and history in relation to wireless media and the electronic mobile device (i.e., handheld PDA, cellphone). What does it mean to enter physical and social space as both engaged and present subject AND as a disembodied subject entering that space via technology? Does the disembodied subject really long to become embodied, and if so, in what form? How do questions regarding transformation and transference relate to the wireless mobile device and the mobile subject? What place could histories of wireless technology have in determining narratives of presence?

In this work, I am utilizing narrative and scientific metaphors of ghosts and haunted space to explore questions of how mobile and networked technologies are reformulating our understanding of subjectivity and presence as both embodied and disembodied subjects in time and space (real and 'virtual'). The mobile device, itself a technological object that can store and 'transmit' encoded and invisible data, also suggests a temporal 'haunted' space and I treat it as such in my current art projects. This temporality also refers to the state of the mobile subject in connected public spaces and in shifting ad-hoc networks.

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