Curating the Afterlife
Traditional archives are cemeteries: they store dead things. Digital memory institutions are different—they curate a Haunted Forest. The artifacts they hold (websites, games, social media feeds) were born to move, interact, and execute. When they are preserved, they are frozen.
A screenshot of a Twitter thread is a ghost. You can see it, but you can't click "Reply." A preserved Flash game running in an emulator is a zombie—reanimated, but severed from its original context (the browser, the friends list, the leaderboard).
The Paradox of Preservation
The central paradox of the Haunted Forest is that use equals preservation. In a physical museum, touching an artifact destroys it. in the digital forest, an artifact that cannot be run (touched) is meaningless. But running old code is dangerous, difficult, and expensive.
Curators of this space must choose between:
- The Corpse: Preserving the static body (screenshots, HTML). Safe, but dead.
- The Ghost: Preserving the visual memory (video recordings). Evocative, but non-interactive.
- The Zombie: Resurrecting the code (emulation). Interactive, but requires constant maintenance.
Field Notes
The Visitor's Experience: Walking through the Haunted Forest (like browsing the Wayback Machine) is an eerie experience. You see the shells of communities that used to bustle with life. The comments are frozen in 2005. The "Sign Up" button leads nowhere. It is a monument to Platform Murder.