Author: wiclark

Wild West of Autonomy

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As technology becomes smarter and smarter, society has hit a point where moral dilemmas are becoming a hot topic in the world of automation. One of the most exciting new technologies, I think, is the self driving car. Cars have had technology assisted driving for almost a decade now (rear-view backup camera, self-parallel parking, remote start, etc.), but we have finally reached the point where self-driving cars have hit the market. Unfortunately, that means we have also reached the point where these self-driving cars get someone killed. So what should we do?

As the articles state, Tesla’s autopilot had been used on public highways for tens of millions of miles before causing a single fatality. I think this reflects a lot of the misunderstanding behind automation and where society is at in terms of its implementation. Automation is a very new technology in the realm of day-to-day life, so it still seems very unorganized to many people. To me, it feels like we are living in the “wild west” days of robotics because we simply do not have a lot of rules regarding what they can or cannot do. This is important because the laws and regulations we put in place for robots now will dictate the kinds of advancements that can be made in this area of technology. Because of that, I think it is very important for people to understand just what kind of technology they have access to (driver assist, not full autopilot) in order to use them properly and not misattribute unfortunate events to the technology itself.

On the topic of self-driving cars, I do think that this is one of the most important areas in which this kind of technology can be implemented. Humans are bad drivers and there is almost no way to communicate with other cars on the road (except brake lights and blinkers, but HUMANS don’t even use those all the time). With self driving cars we have the ability to create a network of cars that can all communicate with one another. No more accidentally changing lanes into someone else’s car or failing to see that the cars in front of you just halted to a stop. Autonomous cars can already help you with these things. The really interesting thing is what this means for traffic. Cars that can communicate and adjust speeds accordingly would make things like highway merging more efficient (read: less slowing down) and intersections wouldn’t need stop signs or stoplights. These are also the areas of roads that see the most human error and the most accidents, but these could be greatly reduced through the use of computers and inter-car connections. Obviously this kind of stoplight-eliminating technology is a long way off, but it is something that could be possible if companies are given enough time to develop technology that can be more affordable for average drivers.

Haunted Media Artist Statement

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One of the most identifying features of the millennial generation is its undying fascination with online connectivity. Everywhere a millennial goes, its almost a sure bet that there’s a shiny metal smartphone in their pocket or in their hand. This technology is extremely new, however, so there was a time when these same millennials were not constantly updating statuses or posting pictures for the world to see. Instead, the device that connected these kids was much simpler: the flip-phone. I’m sure if you think back to your middle school days, many of you will remember the first phone you had.

That phone is very representative of a simpler time. The low-quality ringtones, grainy photos (if your phone even had a camera), and requirement to press a button multiple times to type one character of a text might oddly bring back feelings of nostalgia—when the worst thing you had to worry about was whether your parents would let you go to a friend’s sleepover, or if you could scrape up enough money to go see a movie with your first boyfriend or girlfriend. Although the flip-phones of the time were extremely basic in their functionality, they still served many of the same purposes that smartphones do today.  The texts, photos, and even games are all still there, they just weren’t as dominating in everyday life as they seem to be now.

With this project, I decided to try to recreate a generic middle-school-aged boy’s phone. This flip-phone comes complete with a Minecraft themed background, cheesy ringtones, awkward photos, contact list, and well over one hundred text messages, all acting to provide a snapshot of this boy’s life in the days leading up to his mysterious and unexplained disappearance. These artifacts show how normal the kid was; he texted friends about video games, updated his mom on his whereabouts, has poorly taken team photos in his gallery, and the high scores on phone games are still saved. Presumed dead, his mother continues to text him memorializing messages, wishing him a posthumous happy birthday or telling him that she still loves him, with one of the most recent message coming in on March 27th, 2019—what would have been the boy’s 23rd birthday. In a way, the boy’s phone turns into something like an extremely private Facebook memorial page that only his mother seems to have joined.

People grieve for the dead in many ways and with the widespread use of technology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, many people have moved online to help them mourn the deceased. Cell phones are such a new technology that many people are still exploring the different ways in which they can be used to preserve memories of loved ones after they pass. For this mother, the continued texting is a private place for her to release her thoughts and grieve while not allowing external factors to potentially ruin any memories. The fact that it is a cell phone, not an online page, makes the space more intimate and better protected from trolls.

Just as Victorian Age families kept trinkets of memento mori, the mother in this project memorializes her dead son by keeping his old cell phone alive (Bell, 2016). The photos examined in Bell’s Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography actually contain quite a few parallels to a mid-2000’s flip phone in this context: both are able to capture a moment that is representative of a complete life, but more importantly, both can be used as tools to aid in other processes that the living who surround the dead must endure. As Bell points out in her BBC article, these photos became popular during the Victorian Era as a relatively expensive way to permanently record someone’s physical image, helping families and friends to keep memories of the deceased readily available (Bell, 2016). The flip-phone’s 21st century twist allows the mother to not only capture her son’s personality through digital media, but it also allows her to keep a record of her own emotional reactions to his death in the years following his death, both in the short term and long term. Not only that, but the flip-phone also provides the mother the opportunity to maintain her son’s character long after his death as well. Online memorial pages often times lack original information from the deceased, with a majority of the posts coming from friends or family, who post their favorite memories for the rest to see. In the case of a recovered cell phone, this is not easily done. The phone records exactly how the boy presented himself to the world, becoming a more realistic memorial of who he was while he was still present.

The phone as a memorial site also becomes a great case of what Michael Hviid Jacobson describes as the fifth phase in the history of Death: The Spectacular Death (Jacobson, 2016). The Spectacular Death is described as a phase where “paradoxical tendencies [make] death linger uneasily between liberation and denial as well as between autonomy and control.” The phone, in this case, seems to embody this quote perfectly. It is liberating in the sense that the mother is free to communicate with it however she wants, through grief, sorrow, love, or any other emotion. At the same time, however, it is very limiting in that it will never respond and will never change; it forces its reader to take the information as it is without any sugar coating. This is also what makes it autonomous, as the presence of old data is powerful enough to incite a reaction, while it is still controlled by the mother and father (or whoever is still making payments on the phone so it can receive texts). In another way, this boy’s death has become a spectacle in itself, with the mother continuing to interact with that experience. I guess every project here has become a “spectacle” in a way, due to the fact that we are presenting it in a class completely centered on death, but the fictitious context that the phone exists in is also a spectacle due to the externalization of the mother’s grief.

Lastly, the media by which this story is presented was also meant to reflect a more realistic setting that a few readers might have experience with. A story about a child’s death from only the perspective of the child’s phone could bring back experiences of when you had to endure the death of a friend, classmate, neighbor, or family member not only in the real world, but also in the digital world. I think one of the most natural reactions to this is to wonder what it must be like for the parents of the deceased. Dr. Grace Christ, Dr. George Bonannno, Dr. Ruth Malkinson, and Dr. Simon Rubin published a review, When Children Die: Improving Palliative and End-of-Life Care for Children and Their Families, in which they begin: “The death of a child of any age is a profound, difficult, and painful experience. While bereavement is stressful whenever it occurs, studies continue to provide evidence that the greatest stress, and often the most enduring one, occurs for parents who experience the death of a child” (Christ, et al. 2003). The way it effects parents makes me never want to wish that on my worst enemy. It highlights how strong these individuals have to be in order to make it through emotional times, as recent findings show that parents of a child who has passed are more likely to suffer traumatic stress and emotional dysregulation than if they had lost their spouse (Christ, et al. 2003). The mother’s texts to this phone may seem a strange way to cope with her problems, but it is simply what she feels she has to do in order to properly maintain her mental health.

Not everything in this phone is all doom and gloom, though. Take a moment to browse through it and notice the artifacts that the boy had left behind. What can you learn about him from his texts? What about his pictures? Even something as little as a contact named “The Fixer” with no saved number could tell you something about who this boy was. Play some of the games he left behind, but be careful. Is it right to beat any of his high scores? Would that ruin someone else’s interpretation of these artifacts? It’s a bit of a morbid project, but I think it highlights the importance of these issues, especially as the topic is broadcast in the wake of each new school shooting, taking children away from their parents all too soon.

 

 

Works Cited

Bell, Bethan. “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News, BBC, 5 June 2016, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581.

Christ, Grace H, et al. “BEREAVEMENT EXPERIENCES AFTER THE DEATH OF A CHILD.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Jan. 1970, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220798/.

Jacobsen, Michael Hviid. “‘Spectacular Death’-Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of Death.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 29 Mar. 2016, www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/19.

Online Memorialization in the Physical World

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Grave sites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation and Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning both explore some of the details surrounding the interactions between the living and the dead on social media platforms like Facebook. This is obviously a relatively new way to mourn the loss of someone, but it has already become a popular new way for people to memorialize loved ones and connect with others who may be going through a difficult time.

Upon reading these articles, I decided to go check my own social media profiles to see if I could find examples of this type of memorialization in my own life. Unfortunately, there are two such profiles on Instagram (a Facebook-owned platform) that I follow. Its been years since these profiles had to be transitioned to their current status, but I found that it was still a pretty interesting experience. The profiles, as highlighted in Grave sites and websites, bring back mostly positive memories of the deceased, even though their images do not appear in my feed and the profile itself remains dormant– its essentially a snapshot of their life.

I often times find readings like these to be interesting because of the heavy topics involved. Rarely, however, do I get the chance to experience something like this first-hand. These articles provided me with a greater sense of awareness while I was scrolling through my friends’ old pictures and comments. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked back through these profiles, but this time I was more conscious of the source of my feelings rather than just accepting them for what they were. These profiles are important to me and to the hundreds of people who still follow them because they really do do a great job of preserving something that was created entirely by someone, so I felt more strongly about how crucial these accounts could be for the families and close friends who still have access to them along with their physical belongings that may have become symbolized in a more “traditional” memorial.

The Haunting of the Postmodern: A Comparative Analysis of Postmodern Horror

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It’s a late fall night in 2012 and I’m walking out of a movie theater while wearing a banana costume. As my costume-clad friends and I head to our cars to go home after an excitement-filled day, I couldn’t help but feel let down with how it ended. Spending time with friends is always amazing, of course, but the way we decided to finish our night was to pay $15.00 admission to watch (what I would consider to be) a sub-par horror movie that we all knew was coming. I don’t mean this in a bad way, because Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) thoroughly entertained me for its hour and a half runtime; the problem I had with the movie was that I spent exactly zero minutes of it being scared. Unsurprisingly, this was also the sentiment of audience members and critics alike. Many people looked down on this installment of the series for having no point or lesson to the story, but there are still ideas to unpack and lessons to be learned, especially when put in comparison to other works within the genre. As the 2010’s progressed and the era of Netflix was ushered in, many more of these types of horror films came out, hoping to capitalize on the online platform that provided them more creative freedom when it came to what they were allowed to show on screen.

A few gems have stood out, however, with one of them being Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018), based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 postmodern-gothic horror novel of the same name. Flanagan had his work cut out for him in bringing a critically acclaimed classic into the twenty-first century, yet was still able to produce content that was critically acclaimed in its own right. In contrast to the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Haunting not only kept me enthralled through each of its 10 one-hour episodes, but it also made me feel truly scared every time. Although both of these works deal with a haunted house, they do so in very different ways. The shared aspect of a haunting provides a great starting point to examine how each series uses the supernatural to explore aspects of the natural world.

Image 1 above

Image 2 above

One of the most distinct differences between the franchises is the type of horror that it is able to produce for its audience. Viewers of The Haunting have likely witnessed the eerie visuals that seem carefully yet casually placed in the periphery of shots. Statues, figures, and even ghosts will appear, disappear, or change between shots of the same scene. Two examples have been provided above, try to find the creepy ghosts! Out of the dozens of times this happens throughout the series, the majority of them are never even acknowledged by the characters. They are not irrelevant to the plot, but they are also not an immediate concern either. They are simply there to act as Easter eggs full of suspense. This is all partnered with the actual plot that deals with psychological traumas of childhood hauntings and the demons of the real world. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, became riddled with jump scares in order to maintain its scary yet safe status as a horror blockbuster. In a film that seemed to be experiencing franchise fatigue, some of these jump scares almost appeared ironic as they called back to earlier installments of the series or made fun of the fact that a jump scare was being used in the scene.

So why is any of this important? These two films represent the difference between surprise and suspense, something that Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, has exemplified and explained masterfully throughout his career. This is also representative of something bigger than directing techniques, however, as it represents a distinct cultural shift in the way we utilize technology. Paranormal Activity’s use of sudden and intense jump scares is indicative of the shortening attention spans among people during the rise of smartphones in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. Production companies appear to have thought that the audience needed to see something scary more frequently than before, or else they would lose interest in the movie. It utilizes technology heavily as laptops and smartphones are the “found footage” which we are supposed to be watching. Furthermore, having an invisible antagonist meant the directors could not directly show the ghost creating a suspenseful scene—they effectively limit themselves to scares that involved either no setup or very little setup. The Haunting, however, comes after the wave of smart technology invading everyone’s lives, but at a time that is still dominated by online media consumption. Because of their distribution platform, the directors knew their audience was not limited to a one-time theater viewing that had to be constrained to a maximum of two hours. Instead, they recognized that people were now using the internet to cope with internalized struggles and had an entire season of a show to draw out these conversations in order to create a subtler sense of fear that lasts well after the credits roll.

Isabel Pinedo states “Horror is an exercise in recreational terror,” as she explains how postmodern horror films explore the “terror implicit in everyday life” and the repression of this terror in everyday life (Pinedo, 24-25).  For The Haunting, this is the entire premise of the show. Mike Flanagan has revealed in interviews that his adaptation was essentially a show about characters of a horror movie after the film ends (Flanagan). As each of the main characters grows up in Hill House, their experiences and tragedies there haunt them later in life. They are not scared of those monsters anymore, but they are scared of their own lives due to the lasting effects of their own traumas. Their inner demons during adulthood (like drugs, depression, and unhealthy repression) are clearly connected to the literal demons and spirits that ruined their childhoods. This is how the show really sets itself apart from others, as it deals with very serious and terrifying topics that many will face in their own lives, while connecting everything to what seem to be classical horror monsters that could never be defeated. The main conflict of the show is exactly what Pinedo says postmodern horror is about: the terror implicit in everyday life.

Conversely, Paranormal Activity’s use of technology is what reveals the horror in everyday life. The movie is essentially a “found footage” film, with all of the footage being recorded by iPhones, MacBooks, and XBOX Kinects. After the film’s release, many people simply did not see an overarching message that the movie was trying to convey. This is a sin that can be forgiven due to the film’s lack of surviving characters or unsatisfying character arcs. What most people failed to consider, however, was the medium through which they were viewing the characters. In the movie, technology is what forces the audience and the characters to see the horrors present within their own home. The ghosts may be invisible and nobody believes anecdotal evidence of supernatural events, but the Kinect and laptops cannot be ignored when they capture the silhouette of a small boy or objects being thrown across rooms. This kind of presentation exemplifies the terror in everyday life by connecting the idea of violent supernatural beings to the common technology that audience members likely already posses. As clichéd as the “found footage” trope had become by 2012, this use actually seemed a little refreshing as the medium was an integral part in making the horror of the movie seem more real. It wasn’t the content itself that made the film scary, but rather the media through which we are presented the film’s contents.

These two franchises represent two completely different kinds of postmodern horror. The versatility of the supernatural horror genre is on full display here, as it is used in original Hollywood blockbusters and adaptations of old classics. Each film was also subjected to its own unique societal understanding of horror as a genre, thus forcing the production teams to approach their topics in interesting and creative ways. These series also also exemplify the most important aspect of horror films: their relationships to society and each other. Horror films are products of their time and are representative of topics or problems that societies face. Every film brings something to the table, so each film will have the opportunity to remain relevant in the realm of horror film. To simply overlook a bad scary movie because it is not scary enough is to miss out on an opportunity to learn about the people that made it. Furthermore, it is important to remember that these films can bring ideas out of each other, too. In this case, the two works highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s method of horror, while still covering two completely different sets of ideas. This is simply one of the major advantages that came with the advent of postmodernism and the explosion of the internet.

 

Works Cited

Flanagan, Mike. Interview by Simon Abrams. Vulture Magazine, 12 October 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/haunting-of-hill-house-netflix-mike-flanagan-interview.html

Hitchcock, Alfred. “Alfred Hitchcock Explains the Element of Suspense.” Keynote Speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6folAgGRU&frags=pl%2Cwn

Image 1. https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2018/10/22/hill-house-ghosts/hill-house-3-the-face-in-the-door.w700.h467.2x.jpg

Image 2. https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2018/10/22/hill-house-ghosts/hill-house-5-under-the-piano.w700.h467.jpg

Image 3. https://media0.giphy.com/media/pN1kyZvUveog0/source.gif

Paranormal Activity 4. Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Performances by Stephen Dunham, Katie Featherson, et al. Paramount Pictures 2012.

Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091.

The Haunting of Hill House. Directed by Mike Flanagan. Performances by Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino, et al.  Amblin Television and Paramount Television 2018.

Frankenstein and Facebook

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Because of its involvement with death, resurrection has inevitably become tied to many horror story plots. One of the most famous cases of resurrection comes from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which would become the inspiration for many later horror works. The “Black Mirror” episode Be Right Back follows the same story as Shelly’s, with Martha as Dr. Frankenstein, social media posts as the graveyard body parts, and new Ash as the Monster. As with any good adaptation, the themes and details within the story have changed to more effectively explore contemporary fears or curiosities; in this case, Be Right Back not only explores the possibility of resurrection, but also looks at the disconnect between someone’s social media presence and their personality.

One of the defining features of this episode was its simplicity. With the exception of the cliff picnic scene, the sets are all bland and forgettable. The characters live very average lives. In fact, the characters themselves aren’t anything to remember. Even the insane technology used to resurrect someone is just brushed aside and never explained in depth. Unlike other “Black Mirror” episodes, there is no physical conflict or grotesque action (like bestiality in S1E1, genocide in S3E3, or sadistic Star-Trek-inspired prisons in S4E1). Instead, this episode relies more heavily on the emotions surrounding the situations the characters are in– something that can’t be shown with images, but can have just as big of an impact.

Fake Ash represents two things: the idealized form of the dead and the shallowness of our online personalities. He is a picture perfect copy of his human counterpart, but is lacking in just about every human capacity possible. The major aspects of Ash’s personality, like his wittiness and kindness, are there, but the more ignorable or less desirable features that would never be presented on social media are missing. Martha can’t handle having only the enjoyable aspects of Ash because she already knew and appreciated the traits that made Ash less perfect. His idealized form made him very one-dimensional, so the relationship between the two also became one-dimensional and unenjoyable. Martha quickly realizes the shallowness of his online persona as fake Ash seems to always be reminding her of his inauthenticity. Fake Ash is essentially a form of human hypermediacy. All of this seems to be reminding the viewer that, for many people, online profiles are NOT them, only the idealized and shallowest versions of themselves.

This episode does a good job at doing what “Black Mirror” does best: it forces you to think about your own choices in the real world. Maybe you don’t have the desire to resurrect a loved one, but you probably do have a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account. As Martha steps up into her attic-prison and the screen cuts to black, I like to think the directors wanted the audience to be left staring into that black mirror while considering their own digital presence. Ash is representative of how dangerous and harmful the idealized versions of people can be, so I definitely found myself filled with existential dread (most episodes do this, though) while looking through my own Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Cell Phones Are Smart Tools

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Isabel Pinedo and Tasha Robinson tackle similar subjects in the genre of horror. Pinedo’s Recreational Terror provides a more in-depth look at the themes in classical and postmodern horror films, while Robinson’s Modern Horror Films Are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries focuses on the use of one trend in particular: the useless cell phone. These two articles provide a great backdrop for one another and highlight one of the key changes of society in the twenty-first century.

Cell phones have played an interesting role in the horror genre since their creation and massive proliferation.  Their faulty use in horror films has gone from being a trope to a cliche, but has recently seen some innovation in their use, as pointed out by Robinson in her article for The Verge. In Pinedo’s article, she mentions how many great horror films invoke a sense of fear by disconnecting the protagonist from the rest of the world. This was done by use of a foreign setting in the classic horror films, but the postmodern era saw more blurred connections between the subject and the rest of society.

Cell phones help to create a weak connection to the rest of society in horror films. Simply removing them by clever use of plot devices allowed many of the early postmodern films to help create this feeling of isolation. This is the kind of isolation that comes in The Strangers, Get Out, or Jeepers Creepers. This was how the broken cell phone trope became cliched, however, but filmmakers in the twenty-first century capitalized on increased smartphone and cell phone ownership rates.

Pinedo’s article, though thorough, only covers trends up until the mid 1990’s. What she did not get to include in her article was the rise in smartphone prevalence and subsequent rise in technology based horror films during the twenty-first century. The anthology series Black Mirror immediately comes to mind when thinking of the next step in subversion. The show doesn’t treat technology as a trope to be played with, but it treats technology as an antagonist of sorts. This kind of opens up a conversation about how our technology really does affect our psychology with regard to how we think about and interact with death.