Will holograms of our loved ones help us?
Long before Kim Kardashian West made headlines for being gifted a hologram of her deceased father for her 40th birthday, the tech conference South by Southwest Interactive held a panel called “HoloGramma: How Tech Can ‘Bring Back’ Our Departed,” predicting that technology would allow your dead grandmother to be switched on in the living room whenever you wanted to talk to her.
Is such an idea shocking? I already can make coq au vin at home, guided by an old YouTube video of Julia Child while listening to Prince. To live a media-saturated existence is to swim in ectoplasmic estuaries of life and death, in which living bodies regularly mingle with specters of the long- gone.
The disembodied voices on radios and the luminous figures on cinema screens constitute what media studies professor Jeffrey Sconce equates with hauntings, writing about a “media occult” surrounding the “seemingly ‘inalienable’ yet equally ‘ineffable’ quality of electronic telecommunications.” Communication scholar John Durham Peters claims that modern media is infused with a “spiritualist tradition” — one we participate in as readily as grieving people in 19th- century America and Europe sought out the services of spiritualists, who claimed to be able to conjure the dead for a brief chat. It is, Peters argues, from those very practices of communing with the dead via mediums that we derived our present-day terminology about communication through media.
When a public figure dies, their persona continues to be managed posthumously. Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Mama Cass, Elvis Presley, both dead
Beatles and Tupac Shakur are among hundreds of artists who sold previously unreleased or even newly crafted records while dead. Deceased pop-music figures — from Roy Orbison to Buddy Holly, Michael Jackson to Whitney Houston — have been resurrected for new performances via animated digital simulations; on stage, real people interact with the spectral imagery.
As a former music journalist and current researcher in communication and science studies, I have examined the specific technical means for the production of these “holograms” — an inquiry that began when I received a 2011 press
release about “the world’s first virtual pop diva,” a Japanese anime-style character named Hatsune Miku, who has no corporeal existence but who nonetheless headlines concerts in crowded arenas. When I attended a “live” concert by this digitally projected character, in a large theater with 1,000 rapt fans singing along, the pop-music critic in me wondered whether years of evaluating human performance on stages had been made irrelevant. The scholar in me, however, recognized another intervention of technology into social norms and rushed to connect history and theory to the new experience.
The American fountainhead of this trend was Tupac Shakur, who — 16 years after his death — headlined the 2012 Coachella music festival. Before an audience of nearly 100,000, the real Snoop Dogg and the real Dr. Dre introduced the “not real” 2Pac, who performed two songs (one of which had been released after he died, implying a chain of production unbroken by pesky mortality). My own analysis of spectator reactions posted to Twitter within 24 hours of the Tupac spectacle shows that fans initially experienced unease but then quickly settled into the experience of a reality they were accustomed to through a lifetime of modern media hauntings. They were happily haunted, already living with the dead yet again.
The idea of holographic grandmothers is simply an extension of existing media interactions between the living and the dead. While a Tupac hologram is currently beyond the means of most, the average person’s persona, imprinted across digital platforms, is not buried as efficiently as our body, nor does it decay as swiftly. This data may live on and continue to act.
Each March, Facebook friends and I wish a former colleague a happy birthday, even though he’s been deceased for several years. He responds, too — or his sister does, anyway; she manages Brian’s online afterlife, posting alongside his eternal photographic smile.
It’s no fireside chat with HoloGramma, mind you, but every knitted scarf begins with a few innocent strands.