Ghost Deep explores the crossroads between music, technology and global culture — the three form an ever shifting prism of human-machine insights; they foreshadow the tumults of our time; and they help us envision, construct and understand the invisible cities and networked landscapes of tomorrow. Like an X-ray, it’s through this nexus that we believe journalism becomes “deep journalism,” art becomes “ghost art,” and humanity becomes “ghost deep” — deeper than skin, deeper than bones.
Stylistically, these explorations are written in what Japanese and Tokyo urban designers refer to as ディープ, borrowing the English word “deep” in Japanese katakana syllabaries and transformed into “dīpu” or “di-pu,” as in “dee-poo” (or “deep poo,” “deep shit” — “we’re in deep shit,” “this is deep shit.” Take your pick.) It is hence meant as a metonym for a cross-cultural and mega-cultural attitude and aesthetic. In Tokyo, “ディープ” describes the intense density and detail and heritage of its many layered, packed, and braided buildings, streets, and hidden pockets. It highlights a tension: between modern lived complexity and more Zen minimalist clarities. Also, “deep” or “deepu” speaks not only to the rich textual writing of most Ghost Deep articles, but an equal focus on formatting, where a smoother, painstaking, crafted attention to paragraph form within HTML’s messy constraints, represents a sharp persistent contrast of the machine-human within the inhuman internet — Deepu.
Refracting this human spirit through storytelling in various mediums — text, images, video, audio, mixed — we will explore and try to illuminate humanity’s great migration into the digital dimension. Grounded in historical research and reporting, our mission is to tell stories that are imaginative, authentic, and curious on the one hand, and fair, balanced, accurate, factual, and crucially, compassionate, on the other hand.
Like coders that program and refactor the computer scripts that power today’s artificially intelligent world, or like the writers and painters of old, from Murasaki to Sesshū to Hokusai to Otomo, from Homer to DaVinci to Van Gogh to Tolkien, and its musicians, from Enheduanna to Mozart to Debussy to James, Ghost Deep endeavors to refactor and reimagine the human, the ghost, the myth in the machine...
+ Check out our fantastical side in the world of mythology and sci-fi at Wraith Land. +
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get newsletter versions of our posts in your inbox. In the future Ghost Deep will also include podcasts and other special features. Note however that reading our posts on a desktop or laptop directly on the website is ideal. The formatting of the posts are designed to present a ディープ (“dīpu,” “deep,” “deepu”) aesthetic.
