Billboard is a major
magazine of the music industry in the United States. This last May, Billboard had its Music Awards
event on a Sunday night as it does every year.
But something was profoundly different this year. At one point, Michael Jackson appeared and
started dancing to the “Slave to the Rhythm” song from his new album
“XSCAPE”. First he led a group of
dancers, and then he danced alone. What
is unusual about this is that Michael Jackson is dead.
No, he did not return
from the grave as a zombie or a vampire.
Rather, he returned as a hologram.
Enough visual data had been gathered from him by a computer to create a
moving life-like copy of him.
This kind of hologram
based on recreating a human in virtual reality is called a digital clone. And movie makers have great hopes of
regularly using digital clones to make virtual doubles of actors for stunt
scenes as well as for entire movie productions where costs have to be kept
down. In addition, clones can be made of
actors at different ages, so that an actor can easily appear at different ages
when a script requires it.
Other uses are
projected for digital clones. Make a
hologram of grandpa and grandma so that the grandkids will always have them
close by. Make a hologram of a
historical figure like a holocaust survivor while he is still alive, so that
future generations will see what he is like and what he stands for.
Seems great, doesn’t
it. But wait. Let us digress a little in order to see these
digital clones from another perspective.
In previous articles, I have discussed how a human’s strong reflexive
awareness makes him afraid of death, and how he tries, as a result, to make and
preserve as many organic imprints as he can in order to create a kind of
surrogate immortality and thus prepare for death. In this way, he cushions his slide into
death. Examples of the more discrete focused
kinds of preserved organic imprints are having a baby, planting a tree, building
a business, setting a record in a sport, writing a book, composing a song and
painting a painting. However, there are
also the more continual intangible organic imprints like the memories that one
leaves with family, friends, lovers, and colleagues at work. All these imprints are obviously distinct
from the presence of the person himself.
They are not interchangeable with the person, they cannot truly replace
the person. But after death, they
suggest the previous presence of the person when he was alive. They help recreate the person through
internalized images in the minds of the people that survive him. This is why they are a surrogate immortality
and not a real immortality. There is
never any confusion that a book or a tree is the deceased person. Sometimes, we look at a child and find
resemblances between the child and the parent.
But even then, we still know the child is not the parent.
Then along come digital
clones built on hologram images, and we can be fooled. Actually, watching the Michael Jackson
hologram at the Billboard Music Awards created two levels of being fooled with
two levels of visual mediation. First,
there was the mediation created by the television program. Today, many people have large screens, and it
is very easy for a viewer to be sucked into a program and, on one level, to
feel like he is in the actual location of the television program. So a person could feel like he was in the
location of the Billboard Music Awards.
Second, there was the mediation created by the hologram itself. Because there is no screen for the hologram
experience such as that of the television, which separates television reality
from primary experience reality, the hologram is even more likely to fool the
viewer through its mediated vacuumized presence that it actually is a primary
experience material figure entity.
So here we have a
double layer of experiential confusion, disorientation, and deception. And what I’d suggest is there are unforeseen
consequences of this technological experiential manipulation. Yes it would appear, particularly with the
hologram, that we have come incredibly far in creating a surrogate immortality
that is as close to getting a real immortality as we possibly can, without also
including a person’s consciousness and self-awareness. We see these digital clones as a way of
somehow extracting much of a person’s primary experience presence and
preserving it forever in a mediated technologically-based imprint. But the flow of our experiential focus not
only goes toward the preserved imprint.
The vacuumized aspect of the imprint within the viewer’s confused,
disoriented, deceived mind begins flowing back toward the viewer’s own flow of
primary experience in the real world. In
other words, the hologram’s vacuumized qualities begin to infuse the viewer’s
immediate primary experience, to impart a remote unreal quality to it.
Perhaps there will come
a time when digital clones will become so common that we will be able to speak
of them as mirrors and models for people, much the way complex machines like
computers and robots have become mirrors and models for them now. In previous articles, I have discussed how complex
mechanical entities with complex behaviors can become mirrors and models for
people, much the way parents and parental figures are for children. And holograms just represent a different
pattern of complex entities with unforeseen consequences in the interactions of
humans with modern technology.
What I am focusing on
here is simply an experiential interchange.
Just as the digital clones attempt to carry over some of the elements of
primary experience into a virtual world, so there is a reverse flow of elements
of virtual experience from the digital clones into the world of primary
experience. To the extent that the
primary experience world becomes vacuumized by the presence of digital clones,
it becomes harder for people to bond with and connect to the real material figures
in it. It becomes harder to form
enduring relationships. To the extent
that we intuitively know that the figures we are viewing in the movies and
television programs are holograms, it becomes harder to trust our senses. And that loss of trust infuses into our
everyday life of primary experience.
The combination of
television and holograms creates a double layer of vacuumization. More precisely, it is first a layer of vacuum
backgrounds from the television or movie screen along with the vacuumized human
figures that appear against them. Then
there are digital clones that are already vacuumized figures as holograms,
before they are further vacuumized from
appearing on television.
Vacuumized figures have no grounding, no
organic blendable continual stimuli to give them coherence and substance. Without these organic blendable continual
stimuli, we, as real live humans, sink into numbness. To the extent that we are infused by this
reverse flow of vacuumized experience, we go through the motions of life, truly
experiencing it less and less. That
which surrounds us becomes blurred together with the screen and hologram
experiences and the blurring diminishes our sense of substantive grounded
reality. There were already problems with
experiential confusion and disorientation from movies and television by
themselves. Holograms – digital clones –
will only make this problem worse. What
is real? Where can one make and receive
real organic imprints in order to feel alive?
Instead of just capturing some presence of a person in a digital clone,
we are, at the same time, diminishing the experience of a substantive material
essence in the real people among whom we move and with whom we interact. We start to experience these real people as
vacuumized entities. And, in the long
run, it is not only our experience of the people around us that becomes
vacuumized. It is also our experience of
ourselves. We become like ghosts to
ourselves.
© 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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