Spectral City
Pseudo-holographic Installation
2025.10
Weifan Wang
Pseudo-holographic Installation
2025.10
Weifan Wang
Walking through airports, chain stores, and megastructures, one experiences an uncanny déjà vu—as if haunted. Using Pepper's Ghost, a 19th-century illusion mistaken for holography, I project AI-generated cityscapes that grow, mutate, and dissolve. The installation embodies what I call Spectral Technology: Pepper's Ghost manufactures presence through reflection; AI generates novelty through statistical reassembly. Both are pseudo-technologies—not innovations but reconfigurations, old techniques haunting contemporary media. What appears as a future city is retroactive reconstruction, a landscape perpetually rehearsing what has already been.