Video Is Not ‘I See,’ But ‘I Fly’: The Technics Hauntology of Hung-Chih Peng

It is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. —Jacques Derrida

I. Introduction: Aerial Imagery, Spirit Manifestations

The camera slowly drifts across the screen, past a staircase and a wildly colorful dragon-shaped concrete structure to unveil a temple. As a pond hangs at the top of the screen, we occasionally glimpse the shadow of a bird, but it is hard to discern whether it is plummeting to the ground or soaring into the sky. In the distance is a spiral pagoda only half-visible. The camera slowly glides along the dragon’s spine, as if scanning the unending segments of its body. The image is upside-down, with no ground in sight. We see stairs being spat from the dragon’s lips, or perhaps swallowed by it. These inverted images render a floating, rootless vision without any ground, although we know that the location, the Lotus Pond in Zuoying and they are filmed by a drone. The accompanying music shifts between augmented and diminished intervals, almost whole-tone scales, with no clear tonality. While the image and sound evoke a sensory experience of vertigo, this is not a Hitchcockian vertigo, which arises from the loss of a sense of distance from the ground and is based on a “feet-on-the-ground” perspective. Instead, the vertigo of Hung-Chih Peng needs to float in the air and to elevate above the ground: It is suspended and drifting to animate the phantasm in the motion. Its visual spectrum is like a specter, an apparition, appearing and disappearing, faintly eerie.

This is the opening scene from Hung-Chih Peng’s recent work Psychic Theatre, representing how the presence of a specter emerges and moves. In fact, his earlier work Justice Road Requiem also made use of drone footage, similarly conveying the images of “spirits” in motion. This harks back to the etymology of the word “cinematography,” derived from kino (meaning “motion”) and -graphy (“writing”). In these images devoid of human presence, the true protagonists are specters, flying and suspending in the sky. Of course, the first aerial images were taken by Felix Nadar from a balloon flying over Paris. It was a God’s-eye-view, an all-encompassing perspective of the mundane world from above. In contrast, the “specter gaze” of Hung-Chih Peng is free-floating, dislocated, constantly adrift. It hovers above earthly religious sites, lingering like a specter, like an unwelcome guest who presumes to be the “host”—uninvited and unwilling to leave—suggestive of the wordplay where “guest” and “host” combine to form “ghost,” unceasingly entangled and haunted.

II. The Hauntology of ‘I See’ and ‘I Fly’

We know that the word “video” originates from Latin and originally meant “I see,” incorporating the first-person subject. The same linguistic structure can be found in “audio,” which means “I hear.” However, in Hung-Chih Peng’s images of flight, video is no longer merely a technology for seeing, but a state of “I fly,” in which a drone serves as the first-person perspective of a spirit. Directly translating Peng’s visual vocabulary in the film history, it echoes the maxim: Video is not “I see” but “I fly.” “I fly” can be traced back to Dziga Vertov’s concept of the “Kino-Eye.” It is worth noting that the “eye” here is actually the personification of the machine, declaring the subject “I.” As Vertov wrote: “I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it.” The video art pioneer Nam June Paik, also offered the almost Zen-like comment, “Seeing is not I-see, it is I-fly.” Both of these sayings about images uphold a subjective dialectic between “seeing” and “flying,” between “you” and “I”: From visuality to movement, from whether the subject “I” is human or machine, they involve the fundamental shifting relationship between subject and object of the image-making.

Yet if we return to the paradox of the “kino-eye,” we find that the “I” used here is not a subjective human “I,” but the objective machine “I,” the technological presence that transcends anthropocentrism. This “I” arises from materiality. It is a mechanistic ontology. This “flying eye” is not an extension of the human eye, but an inorganic moving body that operates according to the logic of its own motion. This point is elucidated in Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Dziga Vertov. He emphasizes how the movement of images breaks with visual centrism, transforming “interval” and “montage” from mere narrative tools into the logic of movement generated by the material object itself. Long before humankind operated drones, cameras already possessed non-human perspectives; they were technological devices capable of flying without a subjective self. These “flying eyes” do not rely on the viewer, but instead enter the realm of pure perception of “things" as if they can actively see.  As Walter Benjamin put it, they form the “optical unconscious,” capable of revealing the inner truth.  Whether viewed as the consciousness or the unconsciousness of things, the vitalism demonstrated by images goes beyond the boundaries of the subjective human self. It constitutes a self-operating system, a cycle of automatic perception in which material objects engage, which transcends viewing and is disconnected from humans. Therefore, rather than being an “ontology” of images, it would be more accurately described as a “hauntology,” emphasizing that what the machine sees is not a passive reproduction, but an active force of generation, intervention, and shaping. Images are no longer imitations or reflections of the world, but possessed vessels through which the unknown consciousness and energy travel, materializing like specters and all-pervasive.

III. Media and Mediums

Is it not true, then, that Hung-Chih Peng’s spirit images can count as a “non-human” consciousness system of inorganic technology and media? The upside-down “I see” images captured by drones are transformed into a “machine-I” posture of flight. This presence of a “non-human” spirit underscores that media and technology are not passive tools but actively generate a “universe of things” beyond human experience. Crucially, the sentient beings with spirit consciousnesses in Peng’s works are formed through the artistic vocabulary of post-production montage, not by filming them directly. The power of this montage editing allows indeterminate phantoms to float, rootless and unsettled, in the air. In his video art he strives to form “life” from lifeless image-making machines, not what is seen by the human eye, but the production of images originating from the machines themselves, nurturing interior perceptions and consciousness. The generation of this consciousness stems precisely from the expressive structure formed by the intervals and editing logic of the image medium. Just as the word “medium” has the dual meaning of a “technological medium” and a “psychic medium,” Peng’s works consistently treat audiovisual media as a psychic domain for summoning ghosts—a practice where the “medium” acts as a “medium.”

In Peng’s early video series Unity of All Religions (2004–2008), a dog appears to write lines of scripture. However, in this work (whose Chinese title literally means “Dog Monk”), the dog does not transform into a monk to transcribe scriptures, nor does a monk transform into a dog: it has nothing to do with Zhuangzi’s questioning of the subjective self in his famous allegory of the butterfly dream. The visual consciousness formed in the work comes from the effect of playing it backwards during post-production: The dog eats the text, written with dog food, and then silently exits to the right. In reality, this action would not leave marks on the wall; the only way that the text “appears” is by reverse editing, causing the dog to seem to “lick” the words into existence. When Unity of All Religions was filmed, the dog simply considered itself to be eating food; but for the viewer, the “Kino-Eye” re-encoded this act as a mysterious ritual of inscription—a dog writing religious scripture on a wall with its tongue. These words, as if spoken from the “lips of Jesus,” are sacred texts purely created by image-making machines in Hegel’s early work on Christianity. This is precisely the psychic effect of a spiritual medium: a spectral manifestation generated by image and technology to speak to the self and the others. According to Jacques Derrida’s conceptualization, it is not that ghosts do not exist, but that they are “always already absent.” Therefore, the “hauntology” in Peng’s work is manifested here as the summoning of a technological subjectivity, like a spirit possessing a body—allowing the spirit of a monk to inhabit the dog’s physical body, through post-production editing and the illusions enabled by media. This is a kind of “I see” that can only occur in video, which constitutes the true “essence of film.” This is not about the filmed content itself, but about a new perception and consciousness generated through mediation—a new “epistemological jump,” or a Deleuzian “line of flight.” In Peng’s works, video has become a mechanism for the construction of a technological subjective self, a poetic device where technology and illusion, spirituality and materiality, intersect. Unity of All Religions is not merely about a dog, nor just a performance video manipulated by the artist, but a scene of “pure” image that arises from the birth of a technological noumenon—a Derridean technical “différance”: a rewriting and subversion of language, religion, and viewing systems by non-human machines, much as when the letters DOG are reversed to produce GOD, in which the contrast relationship between them exists only in the purely formal arrangement.

IV. Completing the Media Necromancy of Psychic Theatre

Hung-chih Peng’s film, Psychic Theatre, centers on three theatre artists who died young—Tian Chi-yuan (1964–1996), Chen Ming-Tsai (1961–2003), and Chou Yi-Chang (1948–2016)—attempting to offer continuations or completions of their unfinished works. However, the film’s narrative structure reveals multi-dimensional “gaps” framed within different kinds of dialogue: between living people, between the living and the dead, or even states of interaction between two souls that transpire outside the confines of language. The video contains audio and visual texts generated through translation, forming multiple contextual connections among psychic mediums, which can be understood as a form of “tentacular thinking.” Peng’s media language embodies the archetype of “traduttore, traditore (translator as traitor).” He translates these three dimensions of dialogue into a finished form of the unfinished Psychic Theatre—a collaborative work between the living and ghosts. By translating media into a psychic medium, the work constructs a sensory domain that summons the spirits of the dead and receives linguistic and pre-linguistic memories, allowing the voices of the dead to transcend time and space and recoding them as a “spectral spectrum.” The intermingling of video, editing, sound and performance forms a kind of “Kino-Eye/I” co-written with the deceased—not written for the deceased but co-created with them—a form of creation that belong to a timeless limbo. The “reality of the spirit” must be completed through the virtual powers of media, bridging the “trans-sensory” gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. The “hauntological” structure is deepened by the spectral presence of these artists who died young. Their works were left unfinished, and their times were left incomplete. And the repetition, fragmentation, and unfinished “gaps” appearing in the film as part of Peng’s audiovisual structure act as imprints for the souls of these interrupted lives, much like the writing of a magical book that reveals the subconscious with chaotic, intertwined and illegible marks. Only through the technological presence of media noumena that can be possessed by a spirit can the presence of such a spirit be summoned. The spirit will be remanifested in the scene, residing within the psychic medium of the technological media, returning in a delayed and disjointed manner, a kind of différance, quietly waiting for the right moment to be seen and reiterated.

In Peng’s works, the repetition and looping of images are not merely the technical arrangements of a video installation, but are built upon the structure of spirits hovering, constantly appearing and disappearing. This looping itself becomes a vehicle for the repeated manifestation of spirits and a ritual of summoning with ontological meaning. This explains why, at the film’s conclusion, the artist’s own mother, who was “always already absent,” does not appear as a subject of mourning or memory, but returns in the form of a ghost as the maternal superego. Through the act of summoning and possession within the image, she fulfills the desire she could never realize in life: to care for and gaze upon her child. This specter transformed into a psychic medium finally lands, physically crawling on the stairs of a dragon’s mouth. This scene, like a mother’s version of Hamlet, constitutes a concrete manifestation of “hauntological ontology”—a presence that is no longer symbolic, but an imago, an image that embodies the spirit itself. This transfiguration of the mother does not play in the sequence of a linear narrative, but a structural tautology and a juxtaposition of divergent trajectories of plots—co-constituted by “congruent writing” and “heterogeneous movement.” The looping and delay of the image and its refusal to end are the perception and experience of “hauntological entity.” It is a manifestation that can be embodied through the intervention of non-human technology and media.

V. Summary: The Hauntology of Art and Technology 

In recent years, ontological discussions of technology have often made recourse to Martin Heidegger’s discursive system, viewing technology and art as a poetic device of poiesis (“bringing forth”). These discussions frequently introduce his key term Die Gestell (“enframing”), attempting to reveal how technology can either usher in or obfuscate existence. However, most of these discussions tend to see “cosmotechnics” as a potential path for extending ontology rather than as a radical form of differentiation—what Jacques Derrida called différance. As contemporary art increasingly emphasizes divergent and branching creativity, we must be wary of simplifying the relationship between art and technology into a monolithic structure under the umbrella of being. We should not incorporate art into the order of meaning of existence, as existentialism tends toward exorcism, while art incites enchantment. Therefore, it is necessary to consider a “technics hauntology” to reinitiate the possible conditions for the noumenon of poetics.

Every flight must eventually fall to the ground. This is a visual form of summoning specters: whether flying in the air or crawling on the ground, the structure of time is a non-referential coordinate, both temporary and eternal. This kind of viewing no longer relies on the subjectivity of the perceiver but is a “perception without a perceiver,” in which the camera becomes an active agent of the world, assembling moving images into a new ontological state. The artist uses a drone camera to both actualize and extend Dziga Vertov’s concept of the “Kino-Eye/I,” expressing it literally and meditating it into the spiritual, so that the noumenon of the film itself becomes a presence that resists an ending. This visual logic becomes part of a sculptural installation within the exhibition space. The physical volume inside the gallery is turned into a flying wall panel, whose back-and-forth motion creates a rhythmic alternation of light and dark, black and white eternally. Like a poltergeist from a rootless ghost, it inserts viewers within a spatial perception of wandering and disturbance. In another room, a 1970s-style chandelier swings like the footsteps of the mythical Seventh and Eighth Lords from the underworld, becoming a ritualistic mechanical device. This is not merely a visual effect, but a ritual of spatial transformation—a transitional passage that causes viewing to enter an alternative state of time and space. This flying wall is a material medium that has been possessed, a flickering and suspended device that plays the role of a psychic medium. It summons past events and departed souls, placing the viewer in a phantom realm where life and death, yin and yang, light and shadow are all undetermined.

The film’s endless looping and its resistance to conclusion, together with the repetitive back-and-forth motion of the sculptural installation, provide a way to experience “hauntological being.” This spectral structure is intensified by the unfinished works of the artists who died too young—the mother and the three playwrights. The boundary between their lives and deaths is erased, and the time that has no end can only find expression within the cyclical images of conflicting meaning. These “blank gaps” formed by unconnectable empty scenes, fragmented nodes, and silences filled with longed-for yet unuttered speech are the primal domain for “hauntology,” which can only be manifested when “I fly” images, a technology possessing autonomy, are viewed. Peng’s works are not haunted art; they are art that is doing the haunting. They are responses to the technological noumena of “video” and “I see”: They are a poetic dialogue between the image and the psychic medium. In each of the gaps in the 27.97 frames per second, the artist reunites over and over with his mother, who in the past had always been already absent, allowing her, as a spectral illusion, to return, reappear, revisit, and say goodbye again.