Archive Seizure
Christina Young
→Brown University, MA Public Humanities 2026
Christina Young, Archive Seizure: “Haunt with Image” Input Interface, 2025. Browser extension intervention on RISD Museum digital collection
Christina Young, Archive Seizure: Untitled (Three Haunted Images), 2025. Browser extension intervention on RISD Museum digital collection
For those whose cultural memory has been subjected to colonial erasure, the traditional archive becomes a productive site to mine, search, and listen.Many artists who have turned to archival engagement have grappled with absence and expressed its hidden messages through somatic response, supernatural understanding, and spiritual expression. Projecting knowledge as tingles, intuitions, seizures, hauntings. In the face of absence and fracture, my project Archive Seizure asks: What are the productive possibilities for archives that have erased, silenced, and defined people and culture under the colonial gaze? Artist-scholars Paul Soulellis and Onyeka Igwe argue that there is quantum potential in embodied engagements between contemporary subjects and the archival material of their ancestors,1 even if that material was originally intended to subjugate. This critical proximity, as Igwe puts it, “is an all-bodied encounter with archives, where a surfeit of instincts, desires, feelings or senses can be provoked by the material.”2 For Igwe, there is an openness to the ways that the archive can, as Michel Foucault puts it, “stir ... more fibres in [us],” unlocking the potential to experience embodied knowledge and the shivers of the past held in the body.3 The soul seizes within proximity to the archive, here I seize back.
Archive Seizure is a browser extension that allows me and anyone I invite to “haunt” any online collection. Digital archives already manifest conditions of the spectral. They are simultaneously accessible and alienated, present yet stripped of “aura,”4 neither fully here nor fully absent. As such, my intervention engages the particular uncanniness of experiencing collections digitally, while exploring the capacity and limitations of digitally motivated intervention. The flex- ibility of a browser extension makes it the perfect medium for haunting the digital world. Like a disembodied presence, extensions overlay the web broadly and can intervene at will with little limitation on mobility.
The artist collective Super Futures Haunt Qollective shares my interest in “a theoretical and visceral relationship to haunting…as a decolonial method to reckon with violence and create futures that were always before dispossession.”5 Their performance work is staged as visitations from the “specularity,” a speculative future where they have become dispossessed ghosts who haunt the present conditions which have made them future ghosts. They are both displaced and dispossessed, yet free agents, unbound by the physical constraints that limit embodied subjects. This tension—the tragedy of being made ghosts and the powerful ability to be everpresent, everywhere, persistent—animates Archive Seizure.
I am preparing my future haunting. A haunting born and unmoored from horror, before and beyond dispossession. A stateless and constant form of passage. A passage that is always passing. A shady sort of sovereignty. What do ghosts do when they aren’t haunting? Go to outerspace. Make lists. Window shop. Visit friends. Prank.
Be bored. Haunt other ghosts.
— Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck and Super Futures Haunt Qollective 6
Christina Young, Archive Seizure: Untitled (Haunted Image), 2025.
Browser extension intervention on RISD Museum digital collection
Archive Seizure has two levels of access: one that makes hauntings viewable to anyone who downloads the extension, and a second, approval-only level that allows users to not only view hauntings but contribute them. The user interface is intentionally simple to encourage en- gagement. Ghosts right-click an image in any online collection to be presented with a menu: “haunt with text” or “haunt with image,” which then generates a text box or image upload box, respectively. Each box also features an optional citation input that, if included, appears as a foot- note number attached to the haunted image (we ghosts are all networked, after all). The haunted text or images appear semitransparent over their associated images and are activated by the hover of a mouse, popping up quickly and then fading slowly. This slow fade allows multiple haunted images to interact with each other in association before slipping away elusively, out of capture. These effects evoke the sense of another presence in the archive with the viewer, a persistent phantom voice. In addition to the sense of being watched and talked to, a trail of soft color follows the moving mouse, resisting passive engagement and forcing the viewer to reckon with their own presence in the archive.
To demonstrate the possibilities of haunting the online archive, I intervened in the RISD Museum’s digital collection, overlaying cited text, my own words, and appropriated imagery onto a collection of French paintings. Playful and unsanctioned, this process of haunting immediately raised ethical questions. Considering my class/race/gender positionality and the cultural sensitivities of the objects, which objects is it appropriate for me to haunt? Are any objects off limits? What content is ethical to overlay, especially when it’s appropriated material? Provocative interventions often ride a sensitive ethical line, but my choices were guided by considerations of visibility and invisibility as dual strategies of empowerment. For this haunting, the French paintings collection represented, for me, French colonial dominance and their continued cultural dominance within the art historical canon. It is a collection riddled with ghosts and I intended to channel them.
Christina Young, Archive Seizure: Untitled (Two Haunted Images), 2025.
Browser extension intervention on RISD Museum digital collection
Employing the second person to provoke self-awareness in the viewer, I appropriated Lionel Richie’s song “Hello.” As the mouse hovers over the first three images in the collection, the lyrics appear as an invisible voyeur: “Hello / Is it me you’re looking for / I can see it in your eyes, I can see it in your smile.” In this context, the lyrics take on a different resonance: What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find in the archive? And who exists in the absences? I continued to engage in creative free association, overlaying appropriated images onto the painting collection to use humor and surprise as tools for commentary and reflection. Artist Stephanie Sarley’s image of her interacting sexually with fruit flashes over a still life, an insolent response to the projection of sexuality onto food in Renaissance painting. In another, I overlaid an image of a Victorian-era Chinese sex worker who fashioned her studio portrait in the style of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, speaking to complex interplays of racialized and gendered dynamics across colonial contexts. Though it is impossible to ask for her consent to use this image that was found in a public collection, I ensured she was visible enough to not be forgotten while shielding her identity in spectral opacity.
As a collective and decentralized project, broader questions arise: who gets approved to haunt, and who does the approving? Should content be monitored? Does an agreement need to be drafted for this community of ghosts, and if so, who gets to shape it and how? And ultimately, I have to grapple with the fact that Archive Seizure does not return stolen objects or restore material power to dispossessed communities. What it does, perhaps, is scramble the power dynamics of representation, gaze, and voice within the digital space. In giving users who have been most impacted by the violence of archives the ability to obscure, annotate, and play within them, this project enacts the “shady sort of sovereignty” that Super Futures Haunt Qollective describes. Dispossessed from property, legitimacy, or institutional recognition, it is sovereignty as presence saying Hello, is it me you’re looking for?
Christina Young is an artist, curator, and researcher working in experimental art and curatorial practices that unsettle and reimagine structures of power and knowledge.
1. “Quantum queerness” is Soulellis’s concept of “convening queer kinship across time and space” through encounters with ancestral belongings. Paul Soulellis, “Quantum Queerness,” accessed October 22, 2025, https://soulellis.com/qq/index.html.
2. Onyeka Igwe, “Being Close to, with or Amongst,” Feminist Review 125, no. 1 (July 2020): 44–53,
3. Ibid.
4. Benjamin’s theory of the “aura” refers to the unique physical presence of the art object and its traditional ritualistic value. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–251.
5. “About,” Super Futures Haunt Qollective, accessed October 22, 2025, https://superfutures.art/About.
6. Tuck Morrill and Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 12, no. 1 (2016), 8.