“If datasets are haunted, then the synthetic image is a seance — a way of generating a specter from the datasets. This word, specter, refers to both the appearance of a spirit, but also the appearance of an image, deriving from the Latin for spectrum. The synthetic image is a specter. It’s an image which appears from an unknown place.” Eryk Salvaggio, “The Ghost Stays in the Picture”

The Machine in the Ghost explores the otherworldly presence of technology in our embodied, day-to-day lives. Like ghosts, the mechanisms of artificial intelligence (AI) are assigned agency—even personified—while untethered to time and unaccountable for their effects on human lives. Arguably, AI is changing our world minute-by-minute, consuming more data (and water and energy) in its march toward superhuman efficiency. Bundled and inserted into new and existing products, and released with the promise of enhanced productivity, increased efficiency, and the creation of “new capabilities”, AI will–if you trust what it says about itself–help to solve the world’s most complex problems and improve human life. We may react with a sense of wonder, thrill, or anxiety over what may occur beyond the boundaries of our perception. This is not a new phenomenon: in the 19th century, new technologies like the telegraph, electricity, and photography inspired the parlor séance, spirit photography, and Spiritualist communications with the dead. The four artists in this exhibition, Susanna Crum, Rudy Salgado, Josh Azzarella and Peter Price, investigate the thinning spaces between human innovation and forces once deemed supernatural. These, the invited and uninvited collaborators to our everyday lives, are like ghosts, specters that impart their wisdom and their will whether we know it or not. The Machine in the Ghost invites viewers to consider the stories we tell about these emerging technologies: our shifting realities, potential displacement, and our current uneasy cohabitation with eerie powers that govern or haunt our planet. 

One of the fundamental parts of the machine learning that powers AI depends on "ground truths,” data verified by humans. From this data, computer vision creates “salient objects,” focal points for surveillance, advertising, navigation, and classification. In her artist’s book Ground Truths, Susanna Crum explores parallels between the ways we talk about machine learning and Spiritualist rituals, placing 19th-century excerpts in conversation with commentary on big tech. In Salient Objects (Touch Grass), a printed wall installation that encircles the exhibition space, AI-generated scenes of people engaged in outdoor activities are distilled into haunting silhouettes. Two prints, Quickening (2022) and Attention (2025), examine dislocation in body and mind. Created in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision granting states control over reproductive care, Quickening is a stone lithograph modeled after a 19th-century anatomical illustration, reflecting a time when practitioners in the emerging field of obstetrics replaced midwives, training with anatomical images that depicted pregnancy as disembodied. The cyanotype blueprint Attention depicts the artist's wandering attention as colorful lines diverging through paths, tunnels, and trap doors.

Inspired by 19th-century spirit photography, Rudy Salgado’s tintypes speak directly to the theme of haunting. The ghostly figures in these images reference the specters of technology–computers, phones, and artificial intelligence–alluding to the ghosts both pictured and those left out of the frame. In the US, photography became a popular social medium at a time of widespread collective grief during the Civil War. While daguerreotypes were expensive and fragile, the wet-plate collodion (or “tintype”) process made photographs durable and affordable. For the first time, individuals could mail their likeness across a long distance, document the horrors of war, pose for a picture with a deceased loved one, or keep a lover’s portrait in their pocket. Though postmortem photography was a service widely offered in the mid- to late-19th century, “spirit photographers” like William Mumler captured images of the dead as if they were still living, posing with their loved one for the photograph. Whether accompanied by an apparition or not, photography changed the relationship between life and death, allowing a likeness of the dead to remain present with the living. Now, when our devices and social media companies store an endless record of our actions, locations, and relationships, are we undergoing another seismic shift in our relationships between the living and the dead?    

The haunting images of Josh Azzarella’s Untitled #175a present the landscapes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, completely stripped of their human, robot, and animal presences. Over a period of nine years, Azzarella painstakingly removed every living figure, frame by frame. What remains is the musical score, the empty spaces, the eerily moving doors–a world that exists without humans or AI. Interestingly, Azzarella’s process is similar to AI’s process of “drawing” a salient object: it reduces an image to component parts, isolating visual information to its essence or fundamental pieces. What remains within both AI images and Azzarella’s work are ghostly remnants, pieces of a puzzle that only the creator knows how to put back together.

Peter Price’s paintings and postcard drawings suggest otherworldly transmissions to and from other realms. For Price, a church spire can operate as an antenna to mystical dimensions, and a postcard can be an invitation to a previously-unknown ritual or congregation. Price collects and intervenes upon found objects and printed ephemera, mining them for information as to what is known and what is left to be discovered. Not dissimilar from that of a machine learning model, the recycling and mutation of prescribed “data” discovered by the artist in the attempt to create new information is in some ways a precursor for what is to come with the exponentially growing and self-actualizing artificial intelligences that loom on humanity’s horizon. For Price, found images and objects are not stagnant. Instead, they may be points of entry to metamorphic, at times malicious, paths to the future.

This exhibition is co-curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Susanna Crum.