Description

The Ghosts III

Conceptual photographic research
December 2015 | Variable dimensions

The silence must have been deafening on that highway. Dozens of cars, trucks, vans, all motionless in a monstrous traffic jam that stretched as far as the eye could see, but no honking, no engine running, no radio playing, no voice shouting out an open window. Total silence because of one terrifying crucial detail — no driver visible anywhere. The vehicles were empty, abandoned, and yet they continued to move to roll to clog the lanes as if they had acquired their own life, as if automotive civilization had survived the humanity that created it and continued mechanically automatically to do what it had been programmed to do — circulate, always circulate, even with no one to transport, even without destination, even without reason.

December twenty fifteen, two weeks after the Bataclan, and ghosts haunted Paris but not just metaphorically. The one hundred thirty dead were everywhere, absent presences on café terraces where no one sat anymore, in front of the Bataclan where people left flowers and candles, at the Stade de France, everywhere these human voids that shouted louder than any presence. The Ghosts III continued that series on ghosts but this time not human ghosts, mechanical ghosts, cars without humans haunting the roads like we haunted our own lives after collective trauma, present but absent, functioning but emptied of meaning.

And the sky above that nightmare highway showed something even more disturbing — trees growing upside down, roots in the air, celestial forest suspended in thick haze that protected or hid, hard to say. Nature had fled, it had taken refuge in the sky far from earth become unlivable, far from that infinite asphalt from that endless concrete from that perpetual circulation that had driven out all plant life all animal life all life other than mechanical. Complete inversion of natural order — above what should be below, below what should not even exist, the entire earth tipped upside down by automotive madness that had transformed the planet into a gigantic parking lot where machines wandered eternally searching for their vanished owners.

The highway itself was of impossible width, ten lanes perhaps fifteen twenty, so wide it looked more like a continent than a road, planetary artery that pumped no longer blood but metal and plastic, blood circulation become car circulation, organic life replaced by mechanical life. December twenty fifteen and COP21 had just ended in Paris early in the month, climate agreements signed commitments made to reduce emissions, but in my image the prophecy was clear — too late, humans were gone disappeared evaporated mysteriously, and their creations continued to function without them, cars still rolled by habit by programming by that terrible inertia of systems that once launched cannot stop even when those who created them are no longer there to control them.

The massive trucks stuck among smaller cars told the story of global commerce, those heavy trucks crossing Europe day and night transporting goods that no one was waiting for anymore, phantom deliverymen driving toward empty warehouses for evaporated consumers. The economy continued to turn mechanically automatically even without real economy, even without supply or demand, just the perpetual movement of capital that could only do one thing — circulate, always circulate, flow of goods flow of money flow of data flow of vehicles, everything had to move everything had to circulate or the system collapsed, so even when there was no one left to benefit from this circulation it continued anyway, absurd and magnificent in its absurdity.

Two weeks after the Bataclan and I thought of those moments when you continue to function mechanically after a shock, when the body does what it must do — get up get dressed eat work — but the mind is absent gone elsewhere, ghost in your own life, automatic presence without true consciousness. Paris in December twenty fifteen was like that, the city continued, people went to work did their shopping went out for a drink, but there was this absence this vacuity this feeling that we had all become cars without drivers, circulating by habit by inertia without really knowing where we were going or why we were going there.

And the infinite traffic jam also spoke of our modern condition, this perpetual stasis where everyone moves but no one advances, where traffic is so dense it becomes immobility, where permanent movement produces total paralysis. How many hours lost each day in Parisian traffic jams, the ring road saturated morning and evening, millions of people sitting in their cars breathing exhaust fumes listening to the radio cursing the traffic, life wasted minute by minute in this non-life automotive existence that led nowhere except to more traffic jams tomorrow and the day after and every day until death or until the silent apocalypse where humans would finally disappear and leave their cars to continue without them that eternal traffic jam monument to our collective madness.

The ghosts of the series had long ceased to be human, they had become machines, and perhaps that was the true reversal — we humans we were the ghosts now, evanescent temporary presences in a world increasingly dominated by machines that would survive us, that would continue to function long after our disappearance, highways haunted not by human spirits but by autonomous vehicles that would roll eternally in cosmic traffic toward a destination that no longer existed if it ever existed at all, perpetual circulation in the void, movement without purpose, mechanical life after human death, The Ghosts III.