Thomas Conner
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Phenomonoscopy

The big meanings of 'Nina Simone's Gum'

12/5/2023

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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.

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Holy sheet: A history of media ghosts

10/27/2023

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If I told you to draw a ghost, odds are you’ll draw a white sheet over a human form, with holes for the eyes. Never mind that this fails to represent so many of the qualities we usually ascribe to spirits — that they retain most identifiers of the deceased’s body, and that these are posthumously rendered transparent or spectral — but maybe the fact that you won’t include legs or feet is enough to indicate ghostliness (or at least levitation).
 
It's a cartoony sign today — common from Casper to Scooby Doo — but once upon a time the sheet ghost signified real terror, a corpse come back to life, a zombie that can’t quite shake off its burial shroud or “winding cloth.” It’s a Halloweeny history that allows us a glimpse at a spectrality that often haunts media studies.

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New publication: Holograms & performance

4/1/2023

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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!
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Posthumous holograms ready for prime-time

12/10/2021

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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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    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.


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