Why is it "easier" to capture paranormal evidence using analog tools?
I've been writing a lot about how so many ghost hunting tools feel very analog. So many of them seem like relics from the 1980s and 1990s, like the spirit box, which is simply a modified radio.
I think that innately, we trust these more physical, analog ways of cataloging and interacting with the paranormal. Yes, it's easier to fake a digital photograph of strange phenomena or use a Spirit Box app on your phone. But for some reason, there's a sense that it's easier for the paranormal to interact with these more physical, analog, retro forms of communication and documentation.
I struggle to put my finger on exactly what this is. After all, why do we think that a ghost, spirit, or other paranormal phenomena would have a harder time interacting with a digital device like a smartphone or a laptop, than it would with a older electronic device like a radio or a instant camera?
Shouldn't it be easier to adjust a line of code than to move something in the physical world? After all, if an entity is incorporeal, and so much of our modern technology is as well, then why wouldn't they be able to communicate with us through our smartphones, tablets, and computers just as easily—or more easily—than they might through analog media?
Thinking about this using the Ovilus
You could argue that an entity couldn't interact with modern technology in the same way that it could, say, a film camera, because it's more complex. Maybe my example of an entity interacting with digital devices on a code level is absurd. That argument is fair, but if that's the case, why would a ghost more easily interact with popular digital paranormal investigation gear, like an Ovilus?
While the Ovilus is a (sort of) recent invention, dating back to the late 2000s or so , it has the vibe of an old piece of tech. It's a purpose-built device that takes environmental readings and translates them into words (and other output, like an image ).
My understanding is that this is how the typical Ovilus works (though I assume there's some amount of variation between models): it contains a word bank of ~2,000 words. Each of those words seems to be correlated to a different EMF reading (according to this write-up, at least.) The device monitors EMF readings, then when there's a fluctuation in the amount of EMF in the area, the Ovilus outputs the word that is associated with that reading.
The Ovilus is a very cool and inventive device. I've only used one in person once, but I'd love to get the chance to again. However, there are a number of criticisms you could level at the Ovilus, and many of them are very fair. (I tend to be of the opinion that treating paranormal investigation as scientific experiments—both from an earnest POV and a debunking POV—is missing the point. But that's something for another day.)
My big question here, though, related to analog vs. digital ghost hunting question, is: How does the entity you're communicating with know what words are in the word bank and what EMF readings they're associated with?
To me, this puts the Ovilus in the same camp as something like a modern smartphone: it's a digital device that can interact with and gather data from the world around it, but it operates in a way that's is opaque to (most) humans and entities alike.
Anyone can understand the basic mechanics behind a film camera or a cassette tape—they're straightforward machines, and the operator can open it up and see the physical thing that the data is stored on (the film or magnetic tape, respectively.) So it feels plausible that it'd be straightforward for an entity to interact with. But digital ghost hunting devices that turn environmental readings into words via code and databases? Less so.
Synchronicity as a tool
I'm not saying that the Ovilus doesn't "work," I'm just saying that this piece of physical gear is likely best viewed from a synchronistic standpoint. My credulity is strained by the idea that an entity could understand what words are affiliated with each EMF reading and manipulate the EMF based on that. Like any tool, something like the Ovilus should be woven into the larger narrative of an investigation rather than have its results taken on their own.
What do I mean by that? Basically, if an investigator is using an Ovilus and gets the word "demon" and then thinks that means that they're communicating with a demon, with no other evidence to support that, then I think they're jumping to conclusions.
However, if an investigator is, say, using an Ovilus while someone else is doing the Estes Method, and both the Ovilus and the Estes session start to output the same words or variations on a theme, then that's something to pay attention to and look into.
Basically, any investigation device is probably at its best when its data is viewed as part of a larger narrative of an investigation, rather than when taken at face value.
But if a large contingency of the ghost hunting world is willing to consider the Ovilus as a potentially effective ghost hunting tool, why does it seem like there's so much more skepticism when it comes to considering the possibility that entities could communicate using modern technology? [^1]
Okay, I know I just wrote a whole blog post about that yesterday, but I mean setting aside things that are being manipulated by algorithms and "machine learning." So, yes, there are good reasons not to trust the technology that we use these days. (In addition to the ease of fakery—accidental or intentional—we now all know that our phones spy on us and track our every move.)
But there's something else afoot here. While plenty of folks (including me) do put stock in the synchronicities that show up on our computers and smartphones, I just don't think as many people people generally believe that ghosts are able to interact with those devices.
Like I said, most people don't understand how smartphones and computers work, or at least not as well as we grok radios and instant cameras. But again, why do we seem to think that incorporeal forms would have an easier time interacting with something physical then they would have interacting with something digital?
Or here's a question: are paranormal phenomena interacting with us on our digital devices, but we can't tell, since anything could be written off as a glitch or algorithmic foible? I wouldn't be shocked if that were the case. After all, isn't the digital world—cyberspace, or whatever you want to call it—potentially closer to what the spirit world might be like? Isn't cyberspace place where time and space work differently, and complex, "invisible" forces carry great sway—in a way that isn't so different from some imaginations of other realms of reality?
[^1] Not all investigators feel this way, of course! I'm always a fan of Liminal Earth's approach to the paranormal, which is to have an open mind and try to connect to weirdness in creative ways. They've even shared a way to make custom a digital spirit box using mp3s.
Accidentally overriding reality: untrustworthy and accidentally faked photos
I've been thinking and writing a lot about instant photography as paranormal evidence over the last week or so, and over this period of time, I've come across a number of articles talking about how digital photography, in particular smartphone photography, is beginning to feel less and less reliable. In particular, two news stories have broken that talk about how in some circumstances, you can't trust the pictures that you take on your phone.
The first story is about Samsung's photo "enhancements" (much more on that down below). The second is about how people thought that they were cropping out or redacting sensitive information on screen grabs on their Google Pixel phones because it looked like the images were cropped or redacted. But years later, it's been revealed that the "redacted" data was still available in the file, and it can be retrieved, meaning that credit card numbers, names, addresses, and other sensitive information has been compromised. (By the way, a second "acropalypse" bug has now been found on Window devices, as well—another strike against feeling like you can trust the images that you see on your devices. Images aren't quite what they seem.)
Before I get into the Samsung controversy, I want to elaborate a bit more on some reasons why instant photography feels so trustworthy, particularly in contrast to the mysterious ways in which are phones can twist reality in the photographs that we take.
Instant photos feel real
Like I mentioned when I wrote about instant photos as paranormal evidence, Polaroid photos are extremely physical. They take a moment and immediately allow you to have a keepsake of it, a physical reminder of where you just were, who you're with, or what just occurred. I love bringing my Polaroid or Fujifilm camera on trips, because it's nice to have that physical souvenir of a place, rather than just a bunch of smartphone photos.
So when trying to create a record of something as insubstantial as a ghost, of course it makes sense to want to do that through a physical means. Because, again, instant photographs allow you to take a particular moment in time—something that can only be experienced by being there physically—and turn it into an artifact immediately.
I think there's something in the desire to try to capture a non-corporeal entity like a ghost in an incredibly physical and immediate form of media. It almost feels like a way to "prove" the existence of ghost.
In addition to being harder to fake than digital photography, a Polaroid of a ghost or paranormal phenomena translates an insubstantial thing into a very real feeling photograph. It literally takes the image of the ghost from the theoretical, invisible, untouchable realm of the unknown and turns it into a physical photograph that you can hold. The desire to want to catalog your paranormal experiences using Polaroids makes complete sense. If you see a potentially paranormal anomaly in your instant photo, it feels like the phenomena is more real because it was captured in the picture.
Fakery in smartphone photography
On the other end of the spectrum, there's the computational photography , which can modify the images we photograph with smartphone cameras in various ways. An article in The Verge sums up the recent Samsung controversy well:
This week, Samsung drew criticism for the technology its newer phones use to “enhance” photos of the Moon. A user on Reddit, ibreakphotos, conducted an experiment by creating a blurred photo of the Moon and then taking a picture of it using their Galaxy S23 Ultra. Even though the photo was completely blurry, their Samsung device appeared to add details to the image that weren’t there before, like craters and other marks, calling into question whether the highly detailed Moon photos people have been taking with their Galaxy devices really are photos of the Moon.
The Verge article is a fascinating read; not only does it document the Samsung moon-augmentation scandal, but it also talks about how many, many images of the moon that we see have been modified. Part of that is because it's so easy to do these days:
And while faking the night sky once involved “sandwiching negatives, doing things in the darkroom,” as Nordgren says, it’s become far easier and more prevalent in the age of Photoshop.
“One of the biggest things people do is sky replacements,” Lynsey Schroeder, a professional astrophotographer tells The Verge. “They’ll take the Milky Way from a different photo and Photoshop it in so that it looks like it was there.” An expert would immediately know that it’s fake. “But to the general public, they don’t know.”
As someone who's reworked plenty of photos in Photoshop, I can say that this sort of photo manipulation is trivially easy. Like I've mentioned before, as popular apps like Facetune allow people to modify photos on their mobile devices, people have learned to trust digital photography less and less.
But Samsung's wholesale replacement of the moon in photos—using a "deep-learning-based AI detail enhancement engine"—strikes me as a step beyond that. (Samsung has apparently been using AI in their cameras since the Galaxy S10, and their "Scene Optimizer" technology since the Galaxy S21 series. Though I can tell you that pictures of the moon on my Galaxy S22+ still look like garbage. So they've clearly made some major changes for their latest devices. Either that, or I guess I gotta try using my phone's 100x zoom, which I had no idea existed. )
It's one thing for someone to decide to modify their own photographs; it's another for apps themselves to rework images in the process of capturing them.
In the case of someone photographing the moon and getting a completely different image, there was never a "real," unedited version of the image. You can't revert between the edited and original versions; the edit is the only one that exists.
Samsung isn't the only company that has introduced "computational photography" into its cameras. Apple's live photos and portrait mode could be considered computational photography, but as AppleInsider points out, "users are beginning to ask where to draw the line between these algorithms and something more intrusive, like post-capture pixel alteration."
There are so many questions that this raises, but the question of memory resonates the most to me. Many people (myself included) use smartphone photos as an aide-mémoire. I'll often take pictures not because something is beautiful or because I'm expressing myself artistically, but because I want to remember something. I'm not going to post that image to Instagram, but I will scroll back in my phone, see the timestamped, unaesthetic mirror selfie in a venue bathroom, and think "oh, right, that's the day that I went to that concert."
For me, the visual information that I collect in the form of photos is more for constructing and preserving my memories than anything else. So my question is: If our everyday smartphone photos help us remember reality and our pasts, what happens when, unbeknownst to us, our cameras are modifying the images? In that case, it becomes a form of memory modification. At that point, you aren't the arbiter of your memories; the images on your phone can override your recollections. As AppleInsider eloquently puts it, "the final image doesn't represent what the sensor detected and the algorithm processed. It represents an idealized version of what might be possible but isn't because the camera sensor and lens are too small."
There's something truly chilling about that.
The AppleInsider article goes on:
By changing how the moon appears using advanced algorithms without alerting the user, that image is forever altered to fit what Samsung thinks is ideal. Sure, if users know to turn the feature off, they could, but they likely won't.
So here we are, in a place where large tech corporations have the power to override reality—and perhaps even our very memories. No wonder instant photography, despite its limitations, can feel like a more reliable way to access paranormal realities.
If smartphone cameras are increasingly depicting "idealized" images of the world, smoothing out anomalies and removing variations from what an computer might consider "normal," what does that mean for paranormal photography? Is it possible that phone cameras might capture paranormal phenomena, but the AI in the phone's camera wipes that out, replacing it with "expected" reality? Or could strangeness seep in anyway, through synchronicity and glitches?
DIY REM pod initial build (Learning Things: March 27, 2023)
On Friday, I wrote about how I wasn't quite ready to attempt the DIY rem pod build, but then I ended up doing it anyway. More on that below!
Like I mentioned last week, I want to use Mondays to talk about things I've been learning, researching, and making. I might also include links to articles and other things that I've been consuming over the last week, though sometimes, like today, I'm mostly going to leave that out. The post was getting a little bit long with everything included. (I have an inkling that I might start doing a weekly roundup type post. We'll see.)
As a reminder, the biggest buckets of skills I'm learning, research I'm doing, and personal projects I'm working on are (in no particular order):
paranormal research for my podcast
building up skills (soldering, building electrical circuits, basic coding) to make DIY projects, including some ghosthunting gadgets I want to make
incorporating my art into paranormal investigation
getting a novel into publication- or submission-ready shape.
I don't expect to necessarily make progress on all of these things every week, but I do like the idea of having a check-in. Process is important. In creative work, people see is the final product, and not all the many stumbles and invisible work that it takes to get there. I always love seeing things about people's projects and progress!
So here's what I've got into this week:
Paranormal research
After taking a bit over a month off, I'll be dropping a new episode of the podcast this week. I hate to have taken so much time off, but things have just been incredibly hectic lately. (Though some of that was due to a cool, currently secret upcoming project!)
Anyway, for the next episode, I got to do some fun research about airships, which you'll see crop up in both the episode this week and a blog post.
DIY REM pod project
Last week, after writing so extensively about how I wasn't quite ready to undertake the DIY REM pod build, I ended up being too excited about it and going for it anyway. I'm happy to report that it was easier than I thought it was going to be. There didn't seem to be any faulty components in the kit that I got. It worked despite my shoddy soldering skills.
I'll do a better writeup of this project once I've actually finished it off with a new antenna and housing. But here's a quick rundown of how it went.
It took me about an hour and a half to do the assembly and soldering. I still want to upgrade the antenna and put the device into some sort of housing. But for this initial attempt, I just did the build exactly according to the instructions, so right now, I've got a little circuit board with a wobbly antenna and a row of LEDs (as shown in today's drawing).
I found the directions simple to follow. It was a single page of drawings showing where in the circuit board each component went. It also included some helpful reminders about which components are polarized. Honestly, minimal instructions are ideal for me—my eyes glaze over anything too complex—so I was pretty pleased.
The tricky part for me was just the soldering, because I'm not great at it. I especially struggled with soldering the chip sockets, because the prongs were close together and I kept accidentally bridging the solder. (Also, my left hand is very shaky, which kept throwing me off. I have a ways to go to improve my soldering technique.)
I had to reheat and fix the bridging a few times, which ended up adding some time to the build. But still, for my second attempt at soldering, I'm happy with the amount of time it took me.
Some of the reviewers said that the circuit board was really sensitive to heat and that it was easy to burn the circuit board. That might be the case, but I guess I managed to avoid it. I cranked up my soldering iron to about 560 degrees Fahrenheit and it seemed to be fine. I'm not sure what the ideal temperature would be for this project, or what temperature might be too much for the board. (On the package, my solder says it melts at 430 F, but at that temperature, it just wasn't melting right—probably because it's unleaded. I don't feel comfortable using leaded solder, but I do know that means that it's a little more frustrating to work with.)
In terms of operation, so far I'm noticing that the REM pod is a little finicky. Aside from the antenna issue that I mentioned, in general, a lot of the time when I initially plug it in, it goes haywire. Then it either settles down and acts normally, or it keeps going off. In the latter case, I just unplug the battery, plug it back in again, and then it seems like it works fine.
It was also immediately obvious that the antenna needs to be replaced. The existing antenna is extremely wobbly and flimsy, and it seemed to be setting itself off at first. But once I straightened it out, it worked okay. (But not great.)
I posted a video of me testing it out on instagram, if you want to see it in action.
All in all, I'm very happy with this as an initial foray!
Art and paranormal investigation
I haven't done a ton of automatic drawing, but in my most successful foray to date, I put an electronic track on repeat, blindfolded myself, and then drew. The results were pretty interesting, so that's something I want to continue to play around with.
Last Friday, I stumbled across an album that might serve as an interesting soundtrack to automatic drawing: Satie - Fragments, a compilation of electronic remixes of Eric Satie's work.
Satie was a composer and pianist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. I hadn't been familiar with his work, but when I listened to the album, I recognized some of his stuff immediately. (I'm not knowledgeable when it comes to classical music, but one of my favorite YouTubers used Satie's Gnossienne No. 1 as background music to a video a few years ago. And I am a very attentive viewer of YouTube.)
Interestingly, Satie seems to have had some occult connections. For a time, he even did some composing for a the Rosicrucian group he belonged to. I haven't done a ton of research about him, but I really want to dive deeper into his work and his life. Seems like he was a weird dude.
At any rate, I found these electronic remixes of his work completely enchanting and haunting. They seem perfect for setting a trancelike mood for an automatic drawing session. So that's something I'm putting a pin in for later.
Novel writing
Back in December, I wrote the first draft of a queer solarpunk fantasy romance novel very loosely inspired on the story of beauty and the beast. I started editing it in January, but then I had to pause when things got hectic. I finally had a chance to get back into the editing process this week.
I'd done an initial edit of the first 80% or so of the book, and this week I edited maybe another 5-10% of it. The finale needs an enormous amount of work and basically just has to be rewritten, so it's been slow going. This is very obviously going to be the second of many drafts (as it should be).
I'm a speedy writer (it took me about 34 hours to write the ~50,000-word first draft). But I'm a slower editor, in particular because I write fairly rough rough drafts. Also, in the case of this book, I made some pretty major changes to the main antagonist very late in the process of drafting it, and I still haven't quite worked out all of that character's new motivations and backstory, so I definitely have my work cut out for me there.
This week it was really nice to get back into the flow of editing it. As often happens when I walk away from a project and then return to it, I like it more now than I did when I left it. It's easy to get frustrated looking at your own work, and it's easier to see the good and bad after a little bit of time away from it.
The Polaroid Corporation's history gives some clues to why we feel so nostalgic about instant photography.
As someone who was born in the 1980s, instant photography holds a special place in my heart—Polaroid-branded instant cameras in particular. Last week, I wrote about how popular instant photography is in the paranormal, and how I think it's tied to our sense of nostalgia.
In the course of doing my research for that, I realized that there are some compelling and interesting reasons why people might feel so nostalgic about Polaroids aside from "I remember them from my childhood." So I wanted to pause and explore them here.
The history of Polaroid
The Polaroid Corporation was founded in 1939 and rolled out the very first instant camera, the Land Camera in 1948.
Polaroid enjoyed decades on top of the instant photography world. Though it faced a slow decline starting in the late 1970s into the 1980s, it reached its peak revenue in 1991. Over the following decade, things got gloomier for the company, which finally declared bankruptcy in 2001. The company slowly trundled along after that, before finally stopping production of their analog instant film in 2008.
While I was reading about their corporate history, I realized that the dates in their story feel significant. They read like a list of watershed dates from the last 85 years: They released the first instant camera during that first blush of postwar American prosperity. They were a 20th century icon that declined as the world shifted between the 1970s to the 1990s. The company finally faceplanting in the year 2001 (a year that marked major turning point, societally, from the new millennium to the chaos and ennui following 9/11). Then they shut things down in 2008 (the year the Great Recession began making major headlines.)
Nostalgia is soothing
I'm sure someone could do a fascinating analysis charting the rise and fall of Polaroid and what it says about society, but to me, I see two things: uncertainty and change. Nostalgia erupts during times of change, and many people (myself included) self-soothe with nostalgia.
So, to me, because the timeline of the original Polaroid Corporation hits the big beats of change during the late 20th century into the 2000s, of course it's a particularly nostalgic brand.
Also, for people my age, instant photography is something that we remember from our childhood; for a long time, before the brand was resurrected (more on that below) Polaroids were bygone tech from a bygone era.
It's easy to look at 1991, Polaroid's financial peak, and say "wow, things were so different in the early 90s; the world feels so much more complex now" (especially if you, like me, were a child at the time). Or you could look at 2001 and think about the dot-com bubble and think about how the late 1990s and early 2000s was a time of unparalleled (if foolish) optimism about technology. It's easy to look back at 2001 and think, wow, we had no idea what was coming; we were blissfully unaware. In both 1991 and 2001, everything was about to change in unimaginable ways.
Or you can look at 2008, which was defined by the existential horror of the Great Recession (though there was also an undercurrent of hope that many people felt at the time of Obama's election). When I think of 2008, I consider it a time when there was still a last glimmer of optimism, which was about to be snuffed out.
So when I think of Polaroids, I think of that "idyllic" time before our hopes (as a society) were dashed. Maybe you feel the same way or—particularly if you're younger than me—maybe you have a vaguer sense of the vibes during the 90s and 00s, but you still recognize that faint sheen of optimism that coats the technology of that time.
Polaroid Corporation doesn't exist anymore (though, to be clear, I'm not one to mourn the demise of large corporate powers). Instead, the brand has been revived by a company called The Impossible Project, which was founded in 2008 to produce Polaroid film after Polaroid stopped making it. Impossible now does business as Polaroid B.V., or more commonly called just Polaroid.
More to come
So, given all of this, it makes perfect sense that so many people feel nostalgia for instant photography. Next time, I'll' explore instant photography and ghost hunting a bit more and think about how the physicality of gadgets like instant cameras make them feel more trustworthy to us than newer, less nostalgic, more digital technology.
