Sex-work specters & a cold-case hologram

It’s been 15 years since she was murdered, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Her name was Bernadett Szabó, she went by Betty. At 18, she left her native Hungary for Amsterdam and started earning money in the city’s well-known prostitution trade. Sex work was legalized there in 2000, when the government opted for a “you can’t regulate what’s forbidden” policy in the hope of reducing crime and improving labor conditions. The latter has indeed improved, but sex trafficking hasn’t waned — and crime still occurs, of all sorts.

Like Betty, who was murdered. Within a year of arriving in Amsterdam, she became pregnant; she had the baby and gave her son to a foster family. But one night early in 2009, some fellow sex workers realized they hadn’t seen her in a while. They checked on her room in the Oudezijds Achterburgwal and found her dead, stabbed multiple times.

Betty, though, has haunted investigators for 15 years. The murder occurred in one of the city’s busiest spots, which indicates a likelihood of witnesses. Even all this time later, someone may remember something that would assist the case. So a kind of shrine sprang up on a corner of the Red Light District, full of stickers and visuals related to the case. TV screens loop images from the crime scene and a documentary about Betty’s short life. There’s info about a €30,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

Now, Betty herself haunts the space — as a digital hologram.

A lifesize 3D simulation of Szabó shows her sitting on a stool before a red background, occasionally gesturing to catch the attention of passers-by and even exhaling on the “window” to reveal the word “HELP” scrawled in the resulting fog.
 
A representative of the Amsterdam police admits this is an unusual move for a cold case. “[W]e’re a bit nervous,” he told the Guardian. “We want to do justice to Betty, to her family and friends, and to the case. Therefore, before deciding to use a hologram for the campaign, we brainstormed with different parties both within and outside the police on whether we should go ahead with this and how we should set it up.” An investigator on the case then adds something relevant to the choice of medium: “We hope witnesses who may have been afraid before or kept silent for other reasons now have the courage to come forward.”
 
In other words, they’re going for the unique attention value here — relying on the inherent, Debord-ian spectacle of 3D, Baudrillard-ian simulations. Holograms — as I’m continuing to discover via my own research, especially through two current museum projects — seize spectator attention in deeper, more engaging ways than traditional screened imagery. When an image (especially animated) appears to be free of its frame and liberated from a representational plane, our lizard brains react as they’ve evolved and been socially conditioned to respond to fellow (seemingly) physical beings occupying our shared space. Passers-by catch sight of the dimension and animation of Betty’s likeness, and they are more likely to attend to its messaging by assuming an interpersonal rather than mediated context. They will remember Betty as a person, not a mug shot. The dragon tattoo wrapping around her torso breathes real fire into this kind of interaction.
 
This is the magic of digital holograms and augmented-reality tech — the ways they embody programmed experiences, slipping mediation into the ideal of allegedly one-on-one interactions. Such a mediation masquerade can cut both ways, of course, enhancing the experience for evil as easily as for good. Thus far, thankfully, most of the cases I’ve studied strive for the latter, like the holograms of genocide survivors working to enhance the institutional education at Holocaust museums. Even the Tupac hologram at Coachella many years ago (though hardly ideologically neutral) was an innocent entertainment by comparison.
 
What’s striking about this use of digital hologram display, though, is the liminality inherent to its experience. Holograms essentially blur boundaries between perceptual categories, dimension, even social realities. They’re present more than a photograph or even video; at the same time, though, they amplify an image’s threshold state — at once material but also way more immaterial, ghostly but somehow more tangible. In this way (in so many), Betty’s not done with us, or vice versa. She’s gone but not gone. The police actually have summoned her spirit to help solve her own murder, straight out of a TV script. Seances — technical spectacles designed to invoke uncanny experiences with the spectral — are not historical facts left to the 19th century. They’re being staged right there on the sidewalk trying to catch your eye, jog your memory, stir your soul. (Don’t think a hologram could even be considered as a participant within real, physical experience? Then why did someone on Reddit, responding to this story, comment, “I’m sure nothing nefarious or creepy will be done by police with a hologram of a prostitute behind closed doors”?)
 
The spectrality of Amsterdam sex work doesn’t even require cutting-edge technology. Like countless tourists, I myself have gawked through the alleys where the city’s sex workers ply their trade. Some are long stretches of narrow pavement where one window shops, idly passing pane after pane showing women, men, and nowadays much in between. They’re seated or standing behind the windows, displaying themselves. (I even saw a woman do exactly what Betty’s hologram does: she breathed on the glass and wrote something steamy in the steam!) These windows are already screens, carefully designed interfaces that position spectacle and spectator, situating both within a specific social and economic relationship. Until one opts to change the nature of the interaction, to actualize and physicalize it, the 3D person behind the glass is as virtual and untouchable as any hologram. Choosing to enter their room is not unlike stepping into VR (and, likely for many visitors, an experience that remains to some degree psychologically virtual). Betty’s hologram merely reproduces the historical technical system — just like all 21st-century iterations of Pepper’s Ghost, which update the original 19th-century apparatus simply by swapping the cumbersome old physical materials for digital projection. The intentions are the same: to turn our heads and make us think not about what a representation connects to but who this person before us is.