Remediating the Uncanny: Visualizing Unconscious Drives in Hungry Ghost

This article explores the artistic research behind Hungry Ghost (2022), a short film by first author Guido Devadder that visualizes deep-seated human desire, will (Schopenhauer), and drives (Freud) through the remediation of 19th-century optical devices, such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope. Given the elusive and unconscious nature of these forces, the film adopts an idiosyncratic creation process, merging live-action and animation through hybrid analog-digital approaches. By leveraging the inherent formal characteristics of historical optical toys, Hungry Ghost expands their structural ‘DNA’ while simultaneously transforming their intrinsic affinity for the uncanny. Applying Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation, Hungry Ghost reimagines these seemingly obsolete media in contemporary artistic practice through animated sculptures materialized via 3D printing, filmed in real time, and assembled through spatial and temporal editing. Kaitlin McSweeney’s loop-based soundtrack further amplifies the hypnotic rhythm and compulsive repetition. Through its interplay of materiality, animation, cinematography, and editing, the film itself becomes a metaphor for the unconscious mind—its looping structures, recurring motifs, and temporal disruptions reflecting the tensions between repression and return, the animate and inanimate, the real and imagined. Within this framework, Hungry Ghost employs experimental media archaeology to explore an open-ended, process-oriented methodology guided by intuition and associative thinking. By bridging artistic practice and media-archaeological inquiry, the film demonstrates how re-imagining early moving-image technologies can yield unconventional approaches to visualizing the undercurrents of the human psyche, highlighting the continuing expressive potential of historical media affordances in contemporary expanded filmmaking practices.