THOMAS CONNER

Academic CV & research story

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Etching of a Pepper's Ghost performance at the Royal Polytechnic, from the Univ. of Westminster archives.
Ceci est un hologramme de pipe! One of my own optical hologram experiments at Triple Take Holographics
Three hologram barbers await actual customers inside Tulsa's Greenwood Rising museum
Early in my tenure as the pop-music columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, I received a press release offering the opportunity to “Meet the World’s First Virtual Pop Diva!!” The event was a simulcast concert by the Vocaloid star Hatsune Miku — a popular anime character in Japan that had been brought to life as a digital projection onto live concert stages. Intrigued by the PR text’s futurist discourse and spectacular promises, I attended with mild curiosity. Indeed, in place of a human singer, the animated image of a young girl with blue pigtails was presented as if she were an unmediated, 3D body at the center of that performing space, singing along with a human band and declaring “World Is Mine” (see video at left). The spectacle immediately challenged two decades of criteria I had assembled for the critique of human musical performance, and within a few songs I knew this would become the subject of my master’s thesis (“Rei Toei Lives!: Hatsune Miku and the Design of the Virtual Pop Star,” Univ. of Illinois–Chicago, 2013).
 
The trajectory of my research agenda since has proceeded from this original investigation — qualitative analyses of digital displays that perform human presence, studies of how projections of such presence challenge and renegotiate social relationships and identities, and theoretical critiques of media histories chronicling emerging screen technologies (from holograms to “holograms”). When imagery is presented and projected from veiled apparatuses programmed to produce essentially idolatrous interactions — i.e., when we see the image but not its machine — I argue that (a) the imagery’s seeming materiality renegotiates, reorganizes, and essentially reprograms social space, and (b) the imagery’s alleged immateriality surfaces experiences of spectrality inherent to all modern media (aligned with the theoretical history of Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media and the spiritualist roots of media in John Durham Peters’ Speaking Into the Air). Thus, interaction with this specific style of “technical imagery” (per the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser) may be seen as a social negotiation of contradictions that haunt ideologies of modernity — tensions between presence and absence, body and spirit, life and death.
 
The core of my dissertation (“Learning to Live With Ghosts: Holopresence and the Historical Emergence of Real Virtuality Technologies,” UC San Deigo, 2021) is a media-archaeological study of historical technologies that contributed to this kind of experience — mapping the shifting territories of situated mixed-reality experiences and refining the concept of a media interaction I call holopresence, an embodied form of the virtual within real space through which spectators undergo an enhanced experience of spectrality that situates a subject within these liminal spaces. My main claim is that many seemingly disparate technical-image systems for the representation and simulation of 3D human bodies — from Pepper’s Ghost in the 19th century to contemporary sci-fi imaginaries of “holograms” — are denotatively distinct in their designs but that they share connotations of this essential spectrality produced by modern media imagery. I focus my inquiry primarily on emergences of augmented-reality (AR) displays — devices that situate objects and imagery within spectator space as what I call a kind of “real virtuality” — rather than traditional VR.