Thomas Conner
  • thomasconner
    • Bio
    • Professional: Resumé
    • Academic: CV
    • Teaching
    • Blog

Phenomonoscopy

Posthumous holograms ready for prime-time

12/10/2021

2 Comments

 
Picture
In this week’s episode of the CBS crime drama NCIS, detectives interview an unusual person of interest in a murder case: the victim herself.

Older narratives might have made this possible via a traditional spiritualist séance, with interested parties holding hands around a table as Madame Blavatsky channeled the spirit of the dead in order to ask directly, “Whodunnit?” In today’s séances, however, the medium has become digital media: complex technical imagery systems that archive a person’s likeness and prerecorded messages intended to be posthumously played back for survivors. Several such apparatuses exist already, though most are still in experimental and prototype stages. This NCIS episode, however, brings to the broader public a fairly accurate depiction of what such “holograms” currently look and seem like, as well as providing some early fodder for conversations about how they might be integrated into social realities. That is, people often ask, “Why in the world would you make a hologram of yourself?” Here’s a pop-culture text that starts grappling with a few real answers.

Read More
2 Comments

Looking thru you: 'Get Back,' Beatles séance

12/3/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Get Back — Peter Jackson’s extraordinary new reboot of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1969 documentary footage following the Beatles’ penultimate recording sessions — has been revelatory in numerous ways, from its prompting of astute reconsideration of Yoko Ono’s much-maligned cultural narrative to final proof that Billy Preston utterly saved the day. The remarkable technology used to revive these old reels (and the audio) is important to attend to not only for its importance to the future of film restoration but for its increasing intrusion into filmmaking; Get Back is a highly computed film, perhaps the first movie many have seen with such dramatic and artistic contributions by an algorithm (“And the Oscar for Best Algorithm goes to…”?) — to the point that the documentary’s rotoscopic computation of imagery and sound can be seen as the construction of a kind of virtual reality.

In addition to this surface virtuality of the image, however, I’m interested in the virtuality of the individuals shown through that imagery — and the ways Get Back is less a documentary about live human beings than it is about a socially constituted band of living ghosts.

Read More
0 Comments
    Picture

    this blahg

    I'm THOMAS CONNER, Ph.D. in Communication & STS, and a longtime culture journalist.

    I study the cultural histories and media effects of holograms, AR tech, and virtual performance. I was a pop music critic for 20 years.
    I'm a Taoist and a teaist. All of this and more is fair game here.


    &c. &c. &c.


    Categories

    All
    Academia
    Books
    California
    Communication
    Conferences
    Cultural Studies
    Hatsune Miku
    Haunted Media
    Movies
    Music: Background
    Music: Foreground
    Obits
    Oklahoma
    Science Studies
    Technology
    Television
    Theory: Comm
    Virtual Performance
    Woody Guthrie

    Archives

    November 2024
    October 2024
    June 2024
    April 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    November 2020
    July 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    May 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    RSS Feed

Home

Bio

Professional

Academic

Blog

mine, all mine © 2000-now
  • thomasconner
    • Bio
    • Professional: Resumé
    • Academic: CV
    • Teaching
    • Blog