Ghostly Transmedia: Julian House and Hauntological Audio-Vision

In this chapter, I will explore the work of Julian House, whose output exemplifies media traveling. House’s output can be linked to two broad modes of traveling: firstly, he works across different media formats; secondly, he incorporates fragments of existing works and lets them migrate into new contexts. The first mode relates to transmedia research, which has tended to explore how artistic content can travel across media borders. The study of transmedia is often connected to storyworlds—particularly the continuation of narratives and characters across media—as it was by Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture (2006), in which he argued that “transmedia storytelling” allows stories to unfold “across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (Jenkins 2006: 96). Lisa Perrott has critiqued the dominant strain of transmedia studies for overfocusing on stories and characters, particularly franchised content. She contends that such perspectives overlook a more experimental swathe of artists who work across media but who are not so concerned with narrative storyworlds: “While narrative continuity remains for some directors an important facet of transmedia, narrative discontinuity, audiovisual discontinuity and ‘loose continuity’ also provide important strategies for transmedia artists with avant-garde leanings” (2020: 16). This emphasis is supported by Freeman and Gambarato, who argue that “commercial transmedia storytelling is not the end of the story for transmediality” (2019: 2). Following these approaches, this chapter examines House’s work across media, which does contribute to a broader aesthetic world but is not focused on the continuation of stories or characters....