EVENT: SHADOW CREATURES (27 JUNE–11 OCTOBER 2026, WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND)
Event: Shadow Creatures – From Spirit Photography to the Ghosts of the Algorithm
Venue: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, CH-8400 Winterthur
Dates: 27 June–11 October 2026
Curators: Marco De Mutiis and Rea Grünenfelder
Opening: 26 June 2026, 18:00–22:00
Artist talk and book launch: 27 June 2026, 15:00–16
Featured artists: Cihad Caner, Nina Davies, Tomokichi Fukurai, Sung Chi-Li, William H. Mumler & Helen F. Stuart, Trevor Paglen, Mario Santamaría, Janne Schimmel, Steph Maj Swanson, Shannon Taggart, Agate Tūna and Sheung Yiu, with contributions by students from the Master of Arts in Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI).
Fotomuseum Winterthur presents Shadow Creatures – From Spirit Photography to the Ghosts of the Algorithm, a group exhibition curated by Marco De Mutiis and Rea Grünenfelder, from 27 June to 11 October 2026. The exhibition examines spectral image-making across nineteenth-century spirit photography, photorealistic computer games, networked folklore, corrupted files, CGI, datasets and prompt-based image systems.
The exhibition’s ghosts inhabit séance rooms and darkrooms, then reappear in game engines, dead consoles, NPC routines, ludo-photographic devices and the strange visual residues produced when software fails, loops or invents. The accompanying [permanent beta] research platform includes entries on Fatal Frame’s Camera Obscura, the suicidal photographer(s) of San Andreas, gaming hardware, software cryptids and image syncing, placing game culture inside a wider genealogy of photographic haunting.
Janne Schimmel gives the exhibition one of its strongest links to game art. His sculptural practice treats consoles, homebrew systems, modified devices and repair culture as material afterlives of gaming. In works such as Phantasmic Crystal Interface, Phantasmic Gateways and Their Housings, Case Mods and Ghost Horses, the game device becomes an object of ritual access: a machine that promises entry into other worlds while bearing the marks of obsolescence, maintenance and refusal.
Nina Davies extends the question of spectral images toward platform choreography. Her series Image Syncers, including AI Is Getting Out Of Hand, responds to online trends in which bodies imitate artificially generated videos. The movement vocabulary belongs to TikTok, synthetic media, virtual performance and the economy of purchasable dances familiar from games and avatar cultures. The body becomes an image trained by other images, a performer negotiating machine-generated gesture.
Cihad Caner’s CGI and motion-capture practice adds another register. His computer-generated monsters speak, sing and perform through recorded human movement, turning the monster into a political and technological construction. Steph Maj Swanson’s Loab / Exodus brings the infamous latent-space apparition Loab into the exhibition, a figure that condensed anxieties about prompt-based image generation, persistence, dataset bias and online myth-making after her emergence in 2022.
The exhibition also includes Mario Santamaría, whose work addresses machine vision, mediation, virtuality and surveillance; Trevor Paglen, long associated with the politics of computer vision and training-image systems; and Sheung Yiu, whose research-based practice examines photography at the scale of computation, facial recognition and algorithmic seeing.
Agate Tūna’s Voltentity links analogue experimentation to techno-spiritual energies, while Shannon Taggart’s work on spiritualist communities reconnects contemporary digital phantoms with older occult uses of the photographic image.
Shadow Creatures also reaches back to earlier histories of spirit and psychical photography through Tomokichi Fukurai, Sung Chi-Li, and William H. Mumler & Helen F. Stuart. This historical axis places the algorithmic phantom within an older desire: to make the invisible appear, and to let technical images speak for forces that exceed ordinary perception.
Shadow Creatures is the second edition of [permanent beta], Fotomuseum Winterthur’s research lab and online platform for algorithmic and networked image cultures. Conducted in collaboration with Kutxa Fundazioa, the exhibition will also be presented in San Sebastián in 2027.
Full disclosure: I have written texts for the catalogue and the [permanent beta] platform.
All images courtesy of the artists