 The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself. Each year in the run-up to Wimbledon, the annual sporting event works meticulously to frame itself as less of a cultural construction and more of a natural, pastoral ritual. But in recent years, joint advertisements for the British tennis tournament and its technological partner IBM have stepped up their game.
Repeating and retooling the descriptive phrase “tennis in an English garden,” these ads celebrate what makes Wimbledon, well, Wimbledon — the world-class tennis, the perfectly manicured grass, the quintessentially British charm— while also revealing and showing off a powerhouse of cutting-edge technology and astute business strategy beneath the surface. It's a fascinating paradox at play that makes for a potent case study of the augmentation of our everyday reality by ubiquitous computing — a garden that’s wired for sound, data, and global domination — in service of age-old Enlightenment ideologies.
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 I had been excited to share a new article this week — but I kinda got DOGE'd!
On the heels of several weeks of ethnographic research at Greenwood Rising — a museum conveying experiences before, during, and after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — I wrote "Greenwood Rising: Immersion and Interpellation" for Oklahoma Humanities magazine. The piece sums up some initial thinking about a unique mixed-reality exhibit in the museum, a barbershop in which visitors can sit and get a haircut from three holographic barbers, and the resulting research will comprise the final chapter in my forthcoming book, Looking Through You: Digital Holograms and the New Technical Image. However, Oklahoma Humanities was just notified that its NEH funding (a majority of its budget) had been eliminated as part of the utterly irresponsible cuts made through the new federal government's ham-fisted DOGE office. As a result, the tech-themed spring-summer edition of the magazine, which was due to hit the streets this week, cannot be printed. But they had at least designed it — so the full issue is available online as a PDF here, and my article can be downloaded here. Please consider supporting Oklahoma Humanities and its crucial programs funding art and culture in this state, via donations or contacting legislators.  Ever since I read this book in 2022, I’d been looking for the right syllabus — OK, any syllabus — that could support its wonderful weirdness. Written by a musician, it’s one of the finest theoretical texts about cultural materialism I’ve ever savored. And it’s all about a spent piece of chewing gum.
A new journal article of mine is now published: "Rock and Roll Will Never Die: Holograms and the Spectrality of Performance" in the spring issue of Spectator, the film-studies journal at USC. The work extends a conference presentation I gave at USC's First Forum in 2021. The abstract: In 2012, the rapper Tupac Shakur performed in the top slot at a major music festival — an event only notable because he had died 16 years earlier. The performance was made possible by a 21st-century digital upgrade of a 19th-century stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost, and it ushered in a trend of creating and presenting similar “hologram” performances of posthumous pop stars. This article offers an explanation of what is seen in such a performance, examining the simulation of 3D video imagery designed to veil its mediation in order for its subject to appear unmediated, present, and “real.” Ultimately, I claim that these illusions are contemporary séances — a revival of historically spiritualist practices but one in which what is conjured is actually the deceased’s previously existing performing persona, as the concept has been extended by Philip Auslander. This cultural entity (distinct from the body and able to outlive it) is offered a new embodiment within a media system that restores the immaterial entity to the material space of the stage — a context previously off limits to the dead performer. Read the article here!
 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. |
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I'm THOMAS CONNER, Ph.D. in Communication & STS, and a longtime culture journalist. Categories
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