Ghosts have not always dwelt in darkness. The idea that phantoms and other spirit presences lurk in the dark was not common until the 1700s, in the cultural climate of Gothic romanticism, when a large portion of European sensibility expressed a forceful rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and, above all, of its armed branch, the ‘technicization’ of everyday life carried out by the Industrial Revolution.
Much earlier, however, in Pre-Socratic Greece, ghosts did not live at midnight but at noon, when the sun is at its highest and the shadows are small. This in fact is the moment when things seem most unreal, due to the absence or reduction of their ‘existential thickness.’
This dazzling sense of time that stops flowing – the Mediterranean light that absorbs the sky and transforms earthly things into pillars of salt – was reinterpreted by Giorgio De Chirico centuries later in the suspended scenes of his Metaphysical painting, displaying familiar objects (a glove, a wall, a square) in such a way that they became strangely unreal. This same ‘metaphysical’ feeling was applied by Postmodern design in its operations of deconstruction of the object and transfiguration of the modern.