Ghost tropic: Ross Gibson’s head_phone_film_poems as essayistic cultural form

For over 30 years Ross Gibson has been essaying, in such media as writings, radio, films and video art, in the main, the history of Australian environmental consciousness. More recently he developed a series of works, the head_phone_film_poems that creatively remix material from online and Gibson’s own social-media archives gathered in his immediate neighbourhood over the past decade. This article examines these film poems, and related Instagram posts, as digital cultural forms most closely related to the historical moment in which we find ourselves, utilizing an essayistic mode that reveals the radical potential for social media concerned with engagement at a variance to the predictable conceptions of them as distraction engines.