Author: sumolinek

TIM Sighting

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Recently I came across this article which announces the release of a new Avicii album. Avicii, an EDM musician and DJ who passed away after a battle with mental health problems. The interesting part about this new album is the fact that the songs are being put together and released posthumously. While the songs were nearly finished, the record company used emails and notes that he had written to try and create an album that would be as close to what he would have wanted as possible. This reminded me of several different themes we have discussed in class.

The photo of Avicii that went along with the  album announcement.

The main theme that jumped out at me was celebrity death and the afterlife. We spoke about making money off of dead celebrities and “resurrecting the dead” in ways such as having shows preformed by holograms. A lot of the discussion on those topics showed the negative side, such as problematic celeb tries still earning money and notoriety after they are dead. I feel as if this “resurrection” of Avicii will showcase the more positive side. All the proceeds of this album will go to The Tim Bergling Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps prevent mental illness and suicide. Avicii was not a notably problematic celebrity and all this album brings is help to those who need it and with this album Avicii’s legacy will continue to evolve even after his death.

This article also made me think of our reading “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone”, and how Avicii’s songs (along with the notes and emails) could almost be seen as the physical remains of his personality. It creates a feeling of being able to communicate with the deceased even though they are not there.

 

 

sumolinek

In this class we’ve talked a lot about “keeping people alive” through technology such as AI, but not so much about keeping the physical manifestation of someone alive. I think it is very interesting that the only time the physical (or representation of physical) body is important in remembering the dead is when the dead person is a celebrity. For some reason seeing the physical representation of a dead celebrity whether on stage at a concert or in a movie does not seem as strange as if that person where to be a deceased loved one. For example, in the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back Martha buys and interacts with a re-creation of her boyfriend Ash. It was really unsettling for me to watch how their relationship progressed but reading the articles about Tupac and Carrie Fisher performing after their death seemed very normal to me. I wonder if this is because we do not actually see celebrities as real people and are able to separate them from the rest of the population. For all I know no one has tried to create holograms of their deceased loved ones to have at the dinner table.

The other thing I thought about during these readings was related to my Haunted Media Project. In the tributes I found for Robin Williams one of his characters was almost always referenced and I felt as if that was a way for him and his legacy to be kept alive in the eyes of his fans. Maybe this is why it would not be strange to see stars like Carrie Fisher is movies posthumously since we don’t actually see her in the Star Wars films we only see her character.

Facebooking With the a Dead Genie

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When I first started thinking about what I wanted for this project, I knew I wanted to create something that made one feel like they were communicating with the dead or interacting with them in some way from beyond the grave. This was what I wanted to do based off of personal experience. I have a friend who I met at summer camp who passed away about a year ago. We had not stayed in touch, so I learned the news of her death through many Facebook posts that were posted on her wall. After the first couple of weeks most of the posts stopped but the ones the still continue to this day are from her mother. When she updates her status and it included anything about her daughter she will tag her Facebook account and it will show up on my feed. I always wondered what her daughter would comment on these posts if she was still alive and this project seemed like a good way to explore that type of thinking. The first step was to figure out who I wanted to pick as the subject for my project, and this took a bit of time. I kept coming back to the first day of class where we watched a Bob Ross video and talked about how even though he had been dead for a while, he was still so well-known and universally loved. This was the same feeling I wanted for my subject, so I decided on Robin Williams. He has played so many iconic roles and is iconic in his own right for his comedy and acting and felt like the perfect person for this project.

My initial thought for the implementation of this project was to create a twitter bot that went through non-private tweets and liked and/or retweeted any one that was related to or mentioned Robin Williams, as I felt this would reach a larger audience. Unfortunately, this was not possible with Twitter’s new developer application, so I thought the next best thing would be a fake Facebook account pretending to be Robin Williams.

For the Facebook page I created an account under the name Robin Williams and added relevant information such as a hometown, colleges attended, current city, and relationship status. I added a fun picture for the profile picture and a shot of his family as the cover photo, as usually done on Facebook. (pictured below)

On the Facebook feed “Robin Williams” uploaded different online tributes from various celebrities and other internet users. When people are paying tributes to the dead they know that the celebrity is never going to see it or be able to react. With this Facebook page   “Robin Williams” is able to use the Facebook react button (like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry) and express to the people who wrote these tributes some sort of emotion. As seen below one tribute is tweet from an anonymous twitter account that “Robin Williams” has liked.

When thinking about loved ones who have passed away, it would be such a nice notion to think of them as being able to see posts you write and react to them in a positive way. As mentioned in “Beyond the Grave” people usually target their posts and tributes to the deceased rather than the living.(155) This was not the case for most of the tributes I found for Robin Williams and I attribute this mostly to the fact that these tributes were not posted on some form of his social media.

What I did see these tributes as were “interactive digital tombstones” as each one added to some vision of Robin Williams and he wasn’t able to control their representation of him. I feel as if the Facebook page theoretically gave him back some sort of autonomy since “he” would be able to show his emotions for each tribute through his reaction using the react button. (158)

While this project only looks at reactions to tributes from people not incredibly close to Robin Williams, it would be interesting to also include update posts from family members or loved ones that Robin Williams could react to as well. Having a loved one who passed still able to keep up with your accomplishments and live changes could be very comforting for someone who has lost someone close to them.

When searching for tributes to Robin Williams a simple Google search returned a very large amount, from celebrities and commoners alike. This led me to some research about why celebrity deaths are especially personal to people they never knew and why they have such a presence in online communities. According to “Some thoughts on celebrity deaths: Steve Irwin and the issue of public mourning” The deaths of well-known celebrities can create “communities of mourning” which are amplified online by the media and the sense of belonging to a group that shares similar feelings. The coverage of these deaths is also sustained for longer because of these communities. (Gibson) People still talk about the passing of Robin Williams and pay tribute to him, recognizing how impactful his death was.

While I was reading through the tributes for Robin Williams I noticed many of them were directed towards one or several of his characters. This was interesting to me since it felt like not only were they mourning the death of Robin Williams but also the death of some character that he played. One the most common characters, and one of my personal favorites was the Genie from Aladdin. I wanted to incorporate the importance of his characters into my project somehow, so I decided to fit a 3D printed genie lamp with a sound chip that played the genie’s opening lines from the classic movie. The sound chip was triggered by a light sensor so every time the lamp is opened the sound chip is activated and is reminiscent of the actual lamp from Aladdin. This was the best way I could think of to keep Robin Williams “alive” through some sort of physical object. Having grown up watching Aladdin and being a fan of the movie and of Robin Williams, this piece was very nostalgic to me and gave a sense of comfort when thinking about how sad and tragic the death of Robin Williams was. The lines the genie says when he is first coming out of the lamp are also somewhat relevant to the project as the genie says:

“Oi! Ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck!”

(19 quotes from the genie)

This almost makes it feel like Robin Williams is not dead at all and has just been hiding away in the lamp, once again a way of keeping him alive through one of his characters. A video of the lamp is included below.

Genie Lamp

This part of the project was also inspired by reading from class. “Specifically Dial-a-Ghost”, and “The Weird and The Eerie”. While a genie lamp isn’t quite the same kind of type of communication as a phone, it still has several similar aspects. It is a small object that allows a message to be broadcast and heard by anyone who interacts with it. Edison’s interests included the following, “building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” (Zarrelli) The genie lamp doesn’t allow two-way communication, but it could be considered a way for Robin Williams to communicate with us through a character from beyond the grave.

The genie lamp could also be considered an eerie object since one would expect for a genie to pop out of the lamp while speaking, but this lamp only contains the sounds of a genie but not the physical manifestation. Fisher describes eerie as either the failure of presence or the failure of absence and this lamp would fall under the failure of presence since “the is nothing present when there should be something” (61)

Overall I feel this project reached my initial goal, to make one feel like they are communicating with the dead or interacting with them in some way from beyond the grave. The Facebook page showed what it would be like to have someone who has passed away be able to see and respond to reactions of their death, and I think incorporating the genie lamp added to the sense that he was still present after his death, even if it is only through the characters that he played. Robin Williams is an icon who will continue to “haunt” us through his movies and legacy for a long time to come.

 

Works Cited

Brubaker, J., Hayes, G., & Dourish, P. (2013). Beyond the grave: Facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. Information Society, 29(3), 152-163.

Margaret Gibson (2007) Some thoughts on celebrity deaths: Steve Irwin and the issue of public mourning, Mortality, 12:1, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/13576270601089663

“19 Quotes By The Genie From Aladdin That Made Us LOL!” Freeform.com, freeform.go.com/funday/news/19-quotes-by-the-genie-from-aladdin-that-made-us-lol.

Zarrelli, Natalie. “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: The Spirit Phone.” Atlas Obscura, Oct. 2016, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone.

Fisher, Mark. “Approaching the Eerie.” The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, pp. 61–64.

Breaking Norms (Gender and Horror)

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In class we created a list of binary pairs seen in A Head Full of Ghosts. My group felt as if many of those pairs (witch doctor/doctor, possession/mental illness, supernatural/ natural, public/ private, religion/ science) could be equated to the father/ mother pairing. The father felt the best course of action was to rely on the church and religion to help Marjorie while the mother looked for more logical, scientific reasons and responses to her daughters condition. Merry witnessed several hushed (and not so hushed) disagreements between her parents about how to handle Marjorie and what was really wrong with her. While the father ultimately won out (which fits into familial stereotypes), the Barrett parents do differ with regards to normal gender roles.

Society usually places the hysterics and illogical thoughts of possession onto women, while the “white coat” males of science come to the rescue. It is basically the opposite for the Barrett family. The mother scoffs at the fathers escape to religion and would much rather have her daughter see a psychiatrist. Creed’s article also mentions one part of The Exorcist that breaks away from the male/ female norms and also the norms of horror. While most of the tension in the movie tends to be related to a male/ female power struggle the one dynamic that breaks this mold according to Creed is the struggle between Regan and the entity who possess her. Creed makes an interesting argument that the devil inside Regan is in fact female. This is not what one would expect from an evil spirit possessing a young innocent girl.

Another interesting (somewhat unrelated) comparison between A Head Full of Ghosts and The Exorcist is the thought that the cause of possession could be related to parent-child relationships. Creed talks about how the problematic parts of Regan’s relationship with her mother are amplified in her possession.

“Mother’s swearing becomes Regan’s obscenities; Mother’s sexual frustrations become Regan’s lewd suggestions; Mother’s anger becomes Regan’s power” (pg. 39)

I think this could also translate to A Head Full of Ghosts. Without the families money issues and relationship problems Marjorie’s “possession” may have looked very different.