Patients who awake hear sur­geons’ small talk, the swish and stretch of organs, the suc­tion­ing of blood; they feel the prob­ing of fin­gers, the yanks and tugs on innards; they smell cau­ter­ized flesh and singed hair. But because one of the first steps of surgery is to tape patients’ eyes shut, they can’t see. And because another com­mon step is to par­a­lyze patients to pre­vent mus­cle twitch­ing, they have no way to alert doc­tors that they are awake.

Here, plead­ing tweets appear on the screen before fad­ing away into the void. Yet watch the feed as they re-appear, spewed out again and again due to glitches in Twitter’s API or else tweeted over and over by their cre­ators (assisted, no doubt, by home-made spam­bots) in increas­ingly deranged bids to pen­e­trate their master’s walled garden.

For exam­ple, is it enough for a robot car to pass a human dri­ving test? In licens­ing auto­mated cars as street-legal, some com­men­ta­tors believe that it’d be unfair to hold man­u­fac­tur­ers to a higher stan­dard than humans, that is, to make an auto­mated car undergo a much more rig­or­ous test than a new teenage driver.

On paper, and in the dig­i­tal realm, Aaron Brown exists. He has a State of Ohio driver’s license, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion prov­ing that he is mem­ber of the Lipan Apache Tribe in Texas, and is licensed to oper­ate a boat. Brown is also a cus­tomer of Com­cast and has a State Farm Insur­ance card.

In real­ity, Brown does not exist. He is a ghost, a dig­i­tal specter fab­ri­cated by the pho­tog­ra­pher and visual artist Cur­tis Wallen.

This might sound crazy, but with the right hard­ware it’s actu­ally not that hard. For a start, if you know exactly what fre­quency to lis­ten out for, you can use low– and high-pass fil­ters to ensure that you only have the sounds that emanate from your PC while the CPU decrypts data.