1888: George Eastman patents his Kodak camera, which uses rolls of film to record images.

“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography

In other words, a moment frozen in time. “The past inside the present.”

“Hauntology describes the haunting of a historicised present by spectres that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away.”
— Adam Harper, from his phenomenal essay on hauntology

1956: IBM debuts the RAMAC 305, the first computer with disk storage (or, a means of storing memories/information in a new and permanent fashion).

Harper again:

“I probably don’t need to emphasise the relationship between ghosts and aging technology, but it’s no surprise that since the late twentieth century, as DVD, digital radio, digital recording, digital cameras, digital television and mobile phones were coming onto the scene, noisy ghosts started coming out of videotapes (the Ring), analogue radio (Frequency), analogue noise on television and audio tape (White Noise and Fissures), cameras (Shutter), telephones (One Missed Call), television transmissions (Dead Waves) and even the internet (Pulse).”

2010: Bradford Cox performs as Atlas Sound at the Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival.

Cox’s collaboration with noisy UK spooksters Broadcast was widely hailed (even in the pages of The Stranger) as exemplifying musical hauntology, though Cox has demonstrated hauntological concerns—or at least a preoccupation with ghosts and the afterlife—since the early days of his Atlas Sound project. His debut solo LP, Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, opens with “A Ghost Story,” a bleary instrumental prologue built around the sampled murmur of a young boy stumbling through a phantasmal, improvised narrative. His “River Card” is based on a Puerto Rican short story, and is sung, Sunset Boulevard-style, from the perspective of a youngster who’s drowned in a river’s deep, blue waters. Even casual fans of Cox’s “other band” Deerhunter should be able to suss out his primary lyrical hang-ups: death, decay, memory, and lost time. Additionally, Cox has released two free, marginally hauntological “digital seven inches” with festive Halloween-centric artwork and track names.