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.

Thoughts and Prayers

The inspiration behind the twine game Thoughts and Prayers came in the wake of the New Zealand Mosque shooting. Too often people turn to social media to try and create “change” or empathize with those who suffered from tragedy. These people, especially those with large followings always say the same thing when something happens. “My thoughts and prayers are with those in (fill with national tragedy).” What do these posts really do though? My theory is that they are a way for us to feel included. Those that posts these things don’t really care about fixing or preventing whatever happened, but they want people to know we are thinking about it. They also know that if they say nothing they will appear ignorant or out of touch. So they sent their halfhearted, “thoughts and prayers.” Those thoughts of course go nowhere, and due to the frequency of these atrocities they often fall on deaf ears. I wanted to show the triviality of these post. I struggled with how to properly do so, and I decided that the best way to show how worthless they are was to turn them into currency.

In Thoughts and Prayers, you are a bot reprogrammed to collect as many of these T+P (Thoughts and Prayers) posts as you can without getting caught or running out of time. I wanted the player to want to win, despite what the implications of winning entailed. The two most important aspects of the game for me were that the player felt immersed in winning, and that they saw the triviality of T+P posts.

I drew inspiration for my game from JFK: Reloaded. In this FPS the player takes on the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, on the fateful day he assassinated JFK. You see through the scope of Oswald’s rifle and do your best to line up your shots with JFK and those in the motorcade’s heads. The game itself is pretty difficult to do properly and the player quickly finds themselves trying to shoot the president over and over as they attempt to get a higher score. The harder they try the more they forget that they are reenacting an actual national tragedy through the lens of the man who committed it. Seeing as my game lacked the visuals or mechanics of JFK: ReloadedI needed a way to transform text into an immersive experience. I did this through satirical writing. The narrator is your creator, and only friend. He encourages you and jokes around with you while you commit these atrocities. In practice the narrator was able to pull out smiles from players as they either enjoyed the catchphrases or paradoxical nature of the dialog compared to the work being done. Either way the player was successfully distracted from their morality.

I also looked towards the reading we did in class on trolls, specifically those that troll or make fun of death and or the deceased. This is not a new form of humor as dark humor has been around for centuries[1], but the disrespectful way we address tell our jokes is something unique to our time.[2]I wanted to find a way to talk about tragedy without playing into this trolling level of disrespect. I didn’t want to make things too specific or offensive so I had to be careful with my word choice, a topic I will discuss in the next paragraph. I knew that if I went too radical with my structure then the message would be completely lost. In many ways I used the examples and readings from class as a baseline of things to avoid. This attempt to avoid offense lead me to write the disclaimer page that the game opens with.

With the question of morality being addressed and the confines of my linguistic limitations established I needed a way to ensure that my societal message came across properly. The point system did work to trivialize the posts, but it alone didn’t make a strong enough statement. I again turned to satire and tried to turn real events into ‘game talk’ calling school attacks, “standard” and movie theatre attacks, “American classics.” Though they were still called attacks, they were also used in tandem with works typically associated with good events, such as “fantastic” and “opportunity.” These adjectives help to show the commonality of these tragedies and the absurdity that goes along with their regular occurrence. Nothing you do in this game is really that far-fetched. With the Nuke mission being the only exception. In fact, you’re rewarded for choosing the more dangerous routes outside of just the recognizable ones. The narrator will encourage you to make bold decisions and will respond positively to successful attacks. This was done ironically, but also as a way to give the player positive reinforcement and encourage further play.

Outside of the gameplay the game was inspired by a recent trend of celebrities and politicians on social media. It seems that after every tragedy or disaster there is an outpouring of tweets and Facebook posts that offer up digital “thoughts and prayers” to those who have or are suffering. The only thing I can think of when I see these posts are how little effort they take. A celebrity was probably drinking their coffee and reading their newsfeed when they heard about whatever event that occurred. They then switched over to their account and tweeted out, “my thoughts prayers are with the people of _____.”  After that they likely just went back to their news feed and continue scrolling. It is now an expectation for public figures to do this, so much so that when they don’t say anything they make more news than when they do. One question I has was, what is the difference between sending out a tweet and internalizing an event? The conclusion I came to was that in the grand scheme of things there isn’t really much of a difference. So then why do we do it?

Part of it is the world we live in. This harks back to a discussion we had in class several weeks ago now, where we discussed if we were now in a new age of death. In some ways we are, because we are desensitized to it. We came to a consensus in class that our constant exposure to death has made it so we can’t live a life of constant empathetic misery so we have to block it out. Never before have we been so consistently exposed to death as we are now. Mass shootings and natural disasters gain national attention for no more than a week before the public loses interest. All that was done and all that is left behind are the tweets of sympathy and condolences. Nothing changes because we simply are not motivated by these events anymore. Why is that though? According to an article by TIME magazine it is because the frequency in which these events occur triggers a mental block in our brains that prevents us from being consumed by them.[3]

The TIME article opens with a very powerful line that I found very motivating while I was working on my project.

“It took only 23 days for the U.S. to witness its

11th school shooting of the year, during which a

Marshall County High School student killed two

of his classmates and wounded more than a dozen others.

The Jan. 23 assault, in Benton, Kentucky, was

the second shooting of the week. It was only a Tuesday.”[4]

Mass shootings, terrorist’s attacks and disasters have integrated themselves into our everyday lives. If you watch the news every night you are berated with stories of atrocities, that either occurred or were prevented. The sheer exposure has made it so, “we have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings.”[5]These events are hard to grasp by themselves, the psychology of it is often too complex to understand even when the appropriate amount of time is allowed. Dr. Bruce Harry, spoke to TIME magazine about this question stating, “Because these things are so overwhelming, our central nervous system basically shuts down past a point.”[6]We push things out of our mind because we cannot mentally come to grasps with them. That still bears the question, why do we wish people our thoughts and prayers if we ourselves cannot even comprehend what has happened?

The easiest answer is that we as human are empathetic, social beings and when we see grieving we feel the need to respond. Social media is the most convenient platform do this through, especially when the tragedy occurs on the other side of the country or even world. Clearly thoughts and prayers aren’t working though, so why do we still send them even though they clearly fall upon deaf ears? I hypothesize that public figures in particular send these messages to stay relevant and appear up-to-date. A very interesting study was done by several psychologists here in the US about the fear of missing out on social media. Nearly 70% of adults admit to feeling fears of missing out in their daily lives.[7]Social media has increased the “FOMO” levels in adults exponentially as there is now an endless, constantly changing, supply of new information that we are exposed to.[8]Never before has humanity been so connected. The study found that irritability and anxiety around FOMO increased with social media exposure.[9]People felt the need to know what others were talking about, as well as the need to ensure that others knew that they knew what they were talking about. This creates a competition and hierarchy of sorts, who knows and who doesn’t. In a sense it also asked the question of, who cares and who doesn’t. This can, in part, explain why public figures feel the need to write a message on social media instead of taking action. They care less about the event itself and more about people’s opinion towards them in response to the event.

I am always left frustrated by responses to these atrocities as it is never about the victims. A sentiment that my classmates share based off the subjects they chose for their Haunted Media Projects. The responses also never lead to any real change, just more talk that gets overlooked within weeks of making headlines. The New Zealand shooting really pushed me to make this game because the call for change after the attack was instant and effective. People sent thoughts and prayers as they always do, but more importantly the government and people of New Zealand reacted and created new regulations on guns. It made all the tweets that Americans send out seem even more worthless. I even include a note about the New Zealand shooting at the end of the game. I felt as though it served as the perfect example for how America should’ve been reacting to these tragedies all along and helps to solidify the primary messages of my game. With all this in mind I created Thoughts and Prayers.

Bibliography:

Abel, Jessica. “Scial Media and the Fear of Missing Out: Scale and Development and          Assessment. Journal of Business & Economics Research, Vol. 14 no. 1, 2016.

Ducharme, Jamie.Here’s Why You Can Shut Out the Shock of Mass Shootings.TIME Magazine, NY, 2018

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to           Grief Online.” First Monday, Vol. 16 no. 12, 2011.

Footnotes:

   [1]Jesters in a King’s Court often held the job of telling the King news that no one else dared to deliver. They would do so in a humorous way to lighten the news and hopefully spare themselves from any harm. One famous instance of this was in 1340 when a French fleet was destroyed by the English. The Jester of the French King’s court told him the English sailors, “Didn’t even have the guts to hump into the water like our brave French.”

   [2]Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, Vol. 16 no. 12, 2011

   [3]Ducharme, Jamie. Here’s Why You Can Shut Out the Shock of Mass Shootings.TIME Magazine, NY.

   [4]Ducharme, Jamie

   [5]Ducharme, Jamie

   [6]Ducharme, Jamie

   [7]Abel, Jessica. “Social Media and the Fear of Missing Out: Scale and Development and Assessment. Journal of Business & Economics Research, Vol. 14 no. 1, 2016. 33.

   [8]Abel, Jessica. 33.

   [9]Abel, Jessica. 34.

Project

My project was born, rather fittingly, out of a twitter thread on the Christchurch shooting, as well as our conversation regarding online mourning. The thread stood out to me in the fact that it did not name the terrorist, but rather gave a tweet to each victim, filling the timeline with information about the deceased without even referencing how they were killed. Normally, we know so much about the terrorists themselves rather than the victims, and it was refreshing to see such an inversion. The thread got me thinking about what other victims could use such a treatment, what people have been buried by history in favor of their killer. My mind immediately turned to serial killers. As a casual true crime fan, I’m guilty of preserving the legacy of a murderer and paying the victims only lip service. I know the names of many serial killers, and not a single name of one of their victims or even what their victims looked like.

As I began to work on my project, I became interested in why we, as a culture, are so obsessed with serial killers. Many theorists have already turned their attention to this question, thinking both about actual serial killers and media depictions about serial killers. I think it is important to state that “killing is invested with a high degree of sexual significance” (Hantke 179). While this significance is usually expressed through a man killing a woman, reinforcing and reenacting the trauma of misogyny, the sexual significance can be found in crimes committed for and against any gender. Our obsession with serial killers mirrors our cultural obsession with sex, reified by the sexual crimes many serial killers include in their modus operandi. The voyeuristic element of serial killer entertainment should not be overlooked either, as “we were seduced by being permitted to see, while we were assured of our safety by being kept from seeing it all” (Hantke 178). We are protected by the knowledge that we are not the serial killer’s victims and reclaim power through that—perhaps indicating why so many true crime fans are women. Perhaps we are also interested in the idea of a troubled psyche as “the serial killer is far more fantastic than the murderer in conventional detective fiction; one is ostracized for what he did, the other for what he is” (Hantke 181). Serial murderers represent to us both a taboo and an intellectual conundrum, two ingredients which are sure to lead to cultural obsession.

The media depiction of serial killers naturally follows our obsession in a way that begins to feel wholly American. Not only have “Americans, in particular, developed a fascination with both real and imagined stories about serial killers,” but the overwhelming majority of serial killers have been active in the United States (Roy 90). Perhaps the tensions between individual and community that the American Dream fosters has created a perfect environment for our obsession to flourish. Linnie Blake argues that

mass cultural representations of mass, multiple or serial killer as a means of exploring the contradictions that lie at the heart of culturally pervasive models of American national identity […] set out to explore ideas of murderous criminality as a psychological dysfunction predicated on the individual’s inability to reconcile his personal perceptions, motivations and desires with the democratically agreed empirical norms of the cooperative and conformist society that surrounds him. (Blake 103)

One might even argue that the American Dream is actually realized in the actions of the serial killer as “these criminals give a certain subjective clarity, a certain down home, grassroots ‘I can kill too’ –  and therefore ‘I too exist’ – scenario to what has become an increasingly abstract, fragmented, and dysfunctional project: the American Dream, freedom as the Founding Fathers conceived it” (Conrath 145). Is serial killing an inherent part of the American experience? Blake argues that serial killers are only the latest iterations of our violent and exploitative history; “he is a monster who evokes the complicity of the American people with the nation’s history of genocidal slaughter while retaining a certain aura of individual freedom existing putatively beyond the bounds of civilised life” (Blake 112). Blake’s point is emphasized by the fact that many victims of serial killers are in some way marginalized or exploited, which the murderer is able to take advantage of.

When creating this project, I was conscious of the notion that “in some ways any form of media coverage of serial killers glorifies hatred and violence in their most extreme forms” (Roy 90). Despite purposefully not putting any mention of the serial killer onto my twitter, all the victims were still connected by a thread, and that connection was an unnamed person who killed them. Media has created a fascination with serial killing which has in turn lead to a “wound culture: the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 3). As mass media has become more pervasive, so has the graphic presence of serial killing. “If television is the social subconscious, a sort of serialized super ego that reflects our hopelessly linear cultural stasis, then the serial killer, who functions in the same mode of repetition, is the most logical, dysfunctional, psychotic extreme of which we, serialized victims, are capable” (Conrath 149). Just as serial killing is uniquely American, so too is it uniquely ties to mass media, feeding off the media frenzy to fulfil the cyclic nature of the news. By refusing to name the serial killer which tied the victims together, along with only including information about the victims unrelated to how they died, I hoped to break the cycle of media glorification of serial killing. There were many difficulties, mainly involving how few information we have on the victims I was looking at.

Serial killer narratives, much like horror films, “can help us to articulate the fear of transgression” (Hantke 193). We’ve dealt with such transgressions in class, both regarding horror as well as in the space of grieving. “RIP pages are often open to anyone interested in participated, making them ostensibly private but effective public social spaces” (Phillips 2). By focusing on how the victims died, we as a culture are taking a personal/private event and turning it into a public spectacle, adding to the transgressive and taboo allure of serial killers. “Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space cross” (Seltzer 3). Mourning and remembrance on social media involves taking something private and making it public, which becomes exacerbated and twisted when the deceased is dead at the hands at someone famous. Their death is further publicized and then made all about their murderer. While “most memorials mentioned survivors of the deceased,” memorials for victims of serial killers talk almost exclusively about how they died and the serial killer, rendering the actual victim a mere plot point (Graham et al 39). Graham et al refers to personal memorial sites for a friend or family being “performed online with a potentially sizable living audience,” but the idea of a performance of grief is also weighty when considering all of the sites which I found that were ‘dedicated’ to the victims of serial killers, while in fact only spoke of the manner in which they died (Graham et al 50). Though such performances are not limited to famous murders not just our country, “we here in the U.S., as families, as communities, and as a nation try to forget death and the dead, try to forgo mourning by ritualizing it” (Naas 86). Prior to the Christchurch shooting, every news outlet seemed to cover tragedy the same way—by focusing on trying to figure out the mentality and life of the perpetrator and potentially lionizing one or two of the victims while ignoring the rest. I wanted to break out of this cycle intentionally, and I believe I was able to do so by highlighting victims who are already highly marginalized and erased by the media.

The first victims I looked at were killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys in the Wisconsin area in the late 80s and early 90s. The majority of men he killed were black or brown and many of them were picked up outside of gay bars. Due to the fact that his victims were queer men of color, it took a very long time for the police to take the crimes seriously and catch Dahmer. In fact, at one point, a 14 year old boy escaped Dahmer’s apartment and the police were called, but the police believed Dahmer’s claims that he and the boy were lovers and so they let Dahmer take the boy. Konerak Sinthasomphone then became his 13^th victim. Sinthasomphone was victimized by Dahmer, who knew no one would believe him, and marginalized by the police. “The media discovered that Glenda Cleveland, the mother of one of the girls who had called the police on Konerak’s behalf, had followed up on the case when she heard news reports that a Laotian teenager was missing by calling law enforcement authorities to report what she and her daughter had seen. No officer ever returned her calls” (Roy 105). Dahmer understood that as a white man, he had power over his victims and exploited that. And still, it is Dahmer’s face we recognize in photos, not Sinthasmphone’s. Indeed, Jody Roy further explains this point;

Yet what did we ever really know about his victims? At most, we remember Hicks as the first, Konerak as the one who nearly survived, and Edwards as the one who brought a halt to Dahmer’s killing spree. But that is virtually all we know about them, and even that is tenfold more than we know of the other fifteen lives Dahmer brutally cut short by feeding his insatiable hunger for perverse sexual fulfillment. (Roy 107)

The only things we know about the victims are the aspects of them which are central to their death. How can we remedy this? Narratively, “we need only to glance at the standard spin on the Dahmer story to realize that Jeffrey Dahmer himself is cast in the role of active character” (Roy 11). Clearly, we need to reframe the story that the news media is telling. By casting Dahmer in the lead role, we further remove agency from his victims. By reporting on the full life on the victims, rather than how they met their demise, we can humanize the victims instead of the killer.

I chose to put photos of the victims in my tweets, believe I would be able to further humanize them. Sontag identifies photographs as tools of power, though she places the power in the photographer’s hands, rather than in the hands of the subject being photographed. While I agree that in many cases, “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,” Sontag fails to acknowledge the cultural power of the iconic (Sontag 14). Most people could recognize Jeffrey Dahmer from a picture, or at the very least Charles Manson, but it is unlikely that they could identify any one of Dahmer’s victims. By granting Dahmer iconic status, we have granted him influence which we have denied his victims. In this way, photos of the victims are not artifacts of violation, but rather a response to Dahmer’s cultural legacy. Because my main focus has been Dahmer, I feel I must mention his own photo collection of his victims—by refusing to acknowledge those pictures in my project, I hope to reinscribe agency to the victims by portraying them as they wish to have been seen, rather than how their killer wanted them to be looked at.

My second twitter thread contains victims of a serial killer who has yet to be identified, known as the West Mesa Bone Collector. Very few people know about this tragedy, both because there is no serial killer to glorify in the news, and because his victims were predominantly Latina sex workers. I found very little information online, both about these victims or Dahmer’s, to the point that I was unable to add any additional information to some of their memorial tweets. I did, however, make a point to only include positive information, not in an attempt to erase their lives, but in an attempt to lift up what other outlets ignore. I hope the positive spin did not reduce them, but rather counteracted what the media has done. I left the Twitter itself rather blank, allowing people to inscribe whatever identity they wanted onto the writer. The grey background allows the photos to really stand out, giving readers something to focus on without getting distracted, as they might on Facebook. Twitter felt like the right medium for this project given the limited information that I had, as well as the fact that I hope Twitter continues to be a space to honor victims, as it was for the Christchurch shooting.

Works Cited

Blake, Linnie. “All Hail to the Serial Killer: America’s Last Frontier    Hero in the Age of Reaganite Eschatology and beyond.” The       Wounds of Nations, Manchester University Press, 2008, pp.        101–20.

Conrath, Robert. “The Guys Who Shoot to Thrill: Serial Killers and the American Popular Unconscious.” Revue Française d’études Américaines, no. 60, 1994, pp. 143–52. JSTOR.

“Dahmer Victims and Their Stories – Non Graphic.” Imgur, https://imgur.com/gallery/MrmJn. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 37–53.

Hantke, Steffen. “‘The Kingdom of the Unimaginable’: The Construction of Social Space and the Fantasy of Privacy in Serial Killer Narratives.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 1998, pp. 178–95.

Jeffrey Dahmer | Victims | Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. http://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/dahmer-jeffrey-victims.htm. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

“Jeffrey Dahmer, Part 5- 924 North 25th Street Murders.” Silence Unhinged., 11 Feb. 2018, http://silenceunhinged.com/serial-killer-files/jeffrey-dahmer/part5/.

Journal, Albuquerque. Victims of the West Mesa Murders. https://www.abqjournal.com/community-data/west-mesa-murder-victims. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.

Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 33, 2003, pp. 75–96.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 12, Nov. 2011.

Roy, Jody M. “Glamorized Hatred: Our Obsession with Serial Killers.” Love to Hate, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 89–113.

Seltzer, Mark. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October, vol. 80, 1997, pp. 3–26.

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, 1977.

“West Mesa Homicide Investigation.” City of Albuquerque,                https://www.cabq.gov/police/contact-the-police/west-mesa-homicide-investigation. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.

To access the pages:

https://www.forevermissed.com/stephen-hillenburg/#about 

http://www.qeepr.com/profile/StephenHillenburg/

Life and death go hand-in-hand together, no matter what.  Borrowing the saying common in George R. R. Martin’s continent of Essos, “Valar Morghulis,” or in English, “All men must die.”  It is certain that everyone you know, have known, and will know, will die.  In doing so, we will all leave things behind: husbands and wives, children, pets, money, houses, trinkets, and more.  Humans have, more-or-less, learned some effective ways of coping with such losses, methods that are employed all over the world, tracing back tens of thousands of years.  Whether it be burial rites, a cremation ceremony, or a funeral at sea, we know very well how to handle the physical process of death and what to do with the dead.  However, the practices get more complicated as they begin to relate to how to handle grief, bereavement, possessions left behind, among other things.  When technology was simpler, and humans lacked platforms to easily and quickly share thoughts, stories, and emotions about the dead, as well as mementos of their time on Earth, the grieving process was much more formal and involved wakes, masses, and long periods of time and energy spent by a community to support those in mourning.  As Graham, Arnold, Kohn, and Gibbs mention in their article on the subject, “the gravesite memorial uses its carved stone, inscriptions and position in place to imply a mode of relations that is modern, structured, objectified, formal and intransient: the dead remain spatially sequestered, socially dead and bureaucratised.”  Now, with the advent of the internet, not only is the process of dealing with the digital footprint of the deceased a complicating factor, but also the internet provides a powerful, but double edged tool to help people deal with their emotions such as grief and sorrow.  We use the internet to both ease and speed the process of mourning by creating an image of the person we want to memorialize that is “subjective, personal, and fluid” (Graham et al).  In this way, we revitalize the dead by continuing to interact with their photos, videos, quotes, and stories, but we also distort the idea of the deceased in very individualized ways.  I wanted to examine this dual nature of the internet as both a wildly progressive aid in processing emotions and supporting others going through loss, as well as a public space, susceptible to the whims of relatively anonymous users and domain hosts who might seek to cause more harm than good (or at least benefit themselves) in such trying times.

In order to analyze the internet and its role in grief and bereavement process, I created an online memorial page for Stephen Hillenburg, the creator and original animator/director of the hugely successful cartoon, Spongebob.  Hillenburg passed away in 2018 due to ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease) complications, and is enshrined in most young American’s minds as someone who contributed greatly to their childhoods.  These two qualities, his recent, real-life death and his notoriety make Hillenburg an ideal candidate for online memorials, and indeed he does have more than one made and maintained in his name.  For my purposes, it was useful to be able to appropriate some of the content from those pages, as well as to imitate other, similar memorial websites for celebrities.  Furthermore, I thought it pertinent to create my memorial page for Hillenburg using an available site that exists with the sole purpose of hosting online memorials.

In perusing my options, I came across a couple of decent looking host sites.  The first I used is called forevermissed.com.  I began to make the page, started adding photos, and then found myself cutoff by the paywall- this site wanted me to choose between paying $6 every month, paying $48 every year, or paying $95 one time in order to have access to all the features the site offers.  I then found qeepr.com, what is essentially a mix between Facebook and LinkedIn, but for dead people.  Qeepr offered full functionality of all features for free, but did not allow me to play music or leave candles or flowers for the deceased.  This got me to thinking about the nature of these sites.  We generally assume that websites exist because they generate revenue, even if it’s just enough to cover the costs.  But neither of these sites have any ads.  Qeepr will sell you a QR code that links to your Qeepr page, printed on a keychain that costs $70.  Between that and the $95 fee for premium features on Forevermissed, I can’t see a huge opportunity to make sales.  Given at least some costs for maintaining servers as well as continuing to control the domain, I would assume that both of these sites have sufficient revenue streams – but I can’t believe it comes from selling keychains with a QR code on it.  So, it might be logical to conclude that there is another revenue stream for these sites, and it is probably related to the collection and selling of user data.  However, this is pure speculation, and not a rabbit hole I have time to dive into.

Memorialization used to be a process only available to the upper echelons of society, important politicians, rulers, military leaders, and occasionally members of popular culture.  Sometimes a family could memorialize a passed patriarch, but for the most part only very prominent figures could captivate the audience necessary to truly be memorialized.  However, the internet has changed all of that, as technology is wont to do.  With the ease of accessibility, online platforms provide opportunities for anyone to have a digital gravesite for as long as the host site stays up.  As Kylie Veale puts it in her paper, “Online Memorialization,” “Memorials manifest online as a result of one or more of four motivations: grief, bereavement and loss; unfinished business; living social presence; and/or historical significance.”  However it is important to note that these driving factors are only reasons to make the sites, and that it is only possible to have such a tool available to help deal with loss and grief because of the internet itself.

We can see common qualities of memorials in the posts on Hillenburg’s Qeepr site.  Most often, we see people “invoking remembrance” (Veale) by harking back to their childhood watching and learning lessons from Hillenburg through Spongebob and his friends.  Other times, there are posts that demonstrate commonality and kinship among visitors.  The idea is that we are all in this grieving process together, and these posts serve as a reminder of that and as support towards and empathy with other mourners.  The issue with the internet, however, is that while such offerings of empathy, kinship, support, and remembrance are quick and easy to share with the page, so too are messages of hate, mockery, judgement, and trolling.

On Hillenburg’s Qeepr page you will find almost as many trolling and grief policing posts as you will true memorial messages.  These messages usually mock the dead or those grieving them publicly.  The internet all of a sudden becomes a less appealing place to share somewhat personal feelings when you are vulnerable to ridicule just for sharing heartfelt condolences.  In some cases, trolls get to work “within minutes of [the deceased’s] death” (Phillips).  The ease and simplicity of access that is such an advantage is easily flipped on its head, and well-known deaths become occasions for meme production, attention grabbing, and popularity contests.  As we shift away from long-standing traditions surrounding death and mourning, we have to create new norms in order to help guide us through grief, especially those of us experiencing it for the first time.  As Meghan O’Rourke says in her memoir, The Long Goodbye, “Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say.”  But now, we have come into a new space for mourning in which we lack guides and expectations surrounding what to do or what to say, and this allows for grief policing, or people telling others that they are mourning too much, in the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons.  Unfortunately, these types of people subscribe to “the notion that there is but one way to grieve, and that deviation from that way is wrong” (Garber).  While it might be true that many people over-perform their grief online, there is a time, a place, and a way to confront people about that, and grief policing is not the most productive method.  These reactions to death, and subsequently reactions to those reactions, are just new rituals that need some time and practice in hammering out the details, the expected and accepted practices.  Until they are more clearly defined or defended, online grieving spaces are going to be subject to some trolling.

Online memorials are complex artifacts of our technological time.  On the one hand, they are the logical progression of the grieving process that is a communal experience of human (and not even just human) life and death.  Shared experiences of remembrance, kinship, and support in response to a tragic loss are made easier, more accessible, and far faster in our modern age, and Hillenburg’s Qeepr page reflects these effects.  On the other hand, the nature of the internet is vast, free, and open to input from those who might not agree with everyone’s personal but public expression of grief.  The fact that anyone can sign on, make an account with anyone’s name, and laugh at, judge, and try to police other people’s feelings is also prevalent in Hillenburg’s Qeepr page.  The abundance of trolls contrasted with the sincere, kind messages of remembrance and condolence is a powerful image, one that describes, but hopefully does not define our generation’s mentality towards death and the public expression of emotion.  In the end, this digital memorial site illustrates the potential for progress, as well as the potential for more suffering, both brought about by the very nature of the medium.  I believe that as we continue to explore the digital realm and become acquainted with its nuances, we can find ways as a society to continue to support each other and share thoughts and emotions in difficult times, allowing for free speech and not cutting each other down for speaking our minds.  Truly, “all men must die,” and online memorials and other digital interactions with death begin to show us what comes next for those of us left behind.

References

Veale, Kylie. “FCJ-014 Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004): 1-18.

Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 12, 2011, doi:10.5210/fm.v16i12.3168.

Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: a Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53., doi:10.1080/1472586x.2015.996395.

For my Haunted Media Project, I chose to create five different text message conversations with “Joe” who is a dead father, friend, brother, and husband that has recently died from an opioid overdose. The conversations purposely start out vague with his conversation with his son Daniel which reveals that Joe is gone, however why he is gone or where he went is unclear. All that is known is that he is not coming back. As the texts progress the audience is given more clues as to what happened to Joe and it is eventually revealed that Joe died from an opioid overdose. This text messages story is meant to raise awareness and show the personal side to the opioid crisis through a personal narrative. In the media and health reports there is an emphasis on pure numbers because there are so many people that die from drug overdoses. However, in my project, I dig deeper into one personal story that shows how the opioid crisis is impacting individuals after their family member or friend has died. This project also uncovers how individuals grieve and interact with the dead after they are gone.

There are two theories of how the living (Joe’s family and friends) are able to communicate with the dead (Joe) and this ambiguity leaves the audience to decide how to interpret it. The first theory is that Joe’s ghost is texting his living loved ones. This theory represents the modern-day Dial-A-Ghost phone that Thomas Edison created with the incorporation and utilization of text messaging and cell phones (Zarrelli). This theory also resembles several applications that can be downloaded on one’s phone to interact with ghosts in various ways. In this theory, the living is able to interact with the spirit of the dead in a casual way that is also used to communicate with living people as well. This double purpose of using the phone to interact with the dead and the living adds a creepy and ominous layer to an everyday task and device.

The second theory is that Joe’s texts are coming from a bot that uses information from when Joe was alive. Now the bot is being used as a grieving tool for his friends and family to cope with his sudden loss. An example of this bot can be found in the Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back, when Ash’s digital data is used to create a virtual version of himself so his living wife can still interact and communicate with him (Brooker). In this project, the digital version of Joe is not intended solely for one person. Instead, the bot is meant for five different people that were close to him and the bot acts differently towards each of them because they are all grieving differently. This effect alludes to the possibility that Joe programed who he wanted the bot to contact and what words and interactions he thought would be comforting to each individual. This application could become a reality in the future as a coping tool that people leave behind especially if they know they are dying soon, and they want to leave something for their loved ones. This theory also leaves the audience wondering if Joe’s friends and family know that they are texting a bot.

This story was intentionally enacted through text messages to highlight the hidden and private nature that surrounds death and grieving today. In Philippe Aries’ book, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, he reveals that we are currently in the forbidden death phase where there is a closed awareness of dying (Aries). Death and grieving are privatized, and mourning happens individually instead of collectively. The use of text messages incorporates the privatized death that Aries described in 1975, but it also incorporates modern technology and how it has influenced how we grieve and mourn the dead today.

A review of Kübler-Ross’ newer work, Grief and Grieving, illuminates that “grief is oftentimes a private experience that is revealed to few” (Bolden 237). The text conversations represent this observation as multiple family members and friends of Joe are reluctant to talking to others or seeking help, and instead want to keep to themselves and their phones. The use of cell phones and technology in general allows one to easily keep to themselves and turn to their phone for various distractions instead of facing non-virtual reality. Technology also creates a separate grieving space since individuals will use social media to grieve the loss of loved ones or even use it to evoke sympathy from their friends and followers. Therefore, the use of text messaging for this project was not only intentional but it also shows how technology can play a role in the privatized grieving era we are currently living in.

The five conversations represent different people in Joe’s life, but they also represent the five different stages of grief, as first introduced in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book, On Death and Dying. Through these five different stages of grief represented in the different text conversations, it is revealed how different people who are all currently grieving interact differently with the dead.

The first stage, denial, is represented by Joe’s son Daniel. He is simply denying that his father is gone forever and even asks if he will be there to take him and his friends to a basketball game. In his mind, his dad is immortal, and he refuses to let go of that belief. He completely rejects the idea that anything could take his dad away from his life and is very adamite that his dad is not gone. Kübler-Ross’ section on denial explains that “since in our unconscious mind we are all immortal, it is almost inconceivable for us to acknowledge that we too have to face death” (Kübler-Ross 42). Daniel’s case shows that this also applies to the death of our family members. The audience notices Joe’s ghost or Joe’s bot makes the effort to gently try to convince Daniel that he is in denial and that his father is never coming back.

Secondly, anger is represented by Joe’s wife, Ashley, who is clearly distressed and scared that she no longer has her husband as a partner to parent their children or to support her. She directs this anger towards virtual Joe directly and blames him for her current situation instead of blaming herself. As Kübler-Ross also explains it, it is clear that Ashley is reacting with rage and anger because she has always been in control of her life and now she has no control over her husband’s death and there is no way to fix it so she is enraged (Kübler-Ross 54). This reaction is especially apparent when she tells her dead husband that “You are incredibly selfish. You think that what you did only hurt you? That’s not true or fair. You got the escape, I am the one now living in hell.” After examining these first two interactions, one can begin to uncover how the grieving process interacts with the process of communicating with the dead and how the living are directing their emotions onto Joe who is virtually there for them but can never be there physically again.

Thirdly, bargaining is portrayed by Joe’s best friend Brian who clearly regrets not doing enough to save Joe when he was still alive. Kübler-Ross describes the motive behind bargaining when she states that “the bargaining is really an attempt to postpone; it has to elude a prize offered ‘for good behavior’” (Kübler-Ross 83). Brian is offering different solutions to fix the irrevocable situation so he can postpone Joe’s death. In the text messages, he offers these solutions to Joe himself because he knows Joe is the only one that could have stopped his own death, by not taking the drugs. This interaction is only made possible through the haunted texting that has enabled him to communicate with Joe. Without this haunted media, Brian might have tried to bargain with someone else that had no control over the situation that happened.

Fourthly, his daughter Debra embodies depression as she is struggling to see the purpose of living after learning that her father is now dead. It is clear that she had a close relationship with her father and now that he is gone “there is no one left to live for.” Debra’s interaction with her dead father through text messages does not change her depressed tone and mood, which is not surprising because depression is not fixed in a singular conversation. The conversation does however at least expose her to the idea that her father’s death was not her fault and there are other ways to cope and deal with his death which is what Joe could have programed his bot to do.

Lastly, acceptance is portrayed by Joe’s sister Alice who has begun to accept Joe’s death after a period of shock and surprise. It is important to note that “acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage” (Kübler-Ross 113) because at no point does Alice seem happy. Instead, she has come to terms with what happened and is ready to move on with what that means for her and the rest of the people in Joe’s life. The review of Kübler-Ross’ new book also highlights how she continues to explore acceptance in the grieving process. She explains that “finding closure [means] that a loved one’s death is put into perspective so that one can live with the loss” (Bolden 236) which is illuminated when Alice recognizes that Joe is in a better place now.

Overall, this project hopefully gives the audience some perspective in how different people grieve and how introducing technology into the grieving process can help them to express their emotions and feelings in a privatized modern world.

Works Cited

Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History). Translated by Patricia Ranum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Bolden, Lori. “A Review of On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through The Five Stages of Loss.” Counseling and Values, vol. 51, no. 3, Apr. 2007, pp. 235–37.

Brooker, Charlie. “Be Right Back.” Black Mirror, Season 2 Episdoe 1, Netflix.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. 1969.

Nationa Institute of Health. “Overdose Death Rates.” National Institute on Drug Abuse, Jan. 2019, https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates.

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.

My best friend Landin is a very talented visual artist and she runs an Instagram page where she posts photos of her artwork. I knew when I was assigned this project that I wanted to kill her, that I wanted to use her Instagram, and that I wanted to exploit her life’s work. I have invented a reality in which Landin has passed, and I have made a website where I sell the art from her Instagram account.

There are two main phenomena I am trying to explore through my project. The first is the phenomenon of art being worth more when the artist is dead. The second is the problematic way people interact with the art of dead artists. My website tries to combine these two explorations by combining two varieties of website: it’s an online store, but also a sort of blog. I will explain the ways I handle my interests first by discussing the store, and then by discussing the blog.

That art goes up in value when the artist dies is something I and I think most other people know to be true, but I don’t think anyone can really explain why. M. D. Edwards knows it’s true in “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” The factors that determine a painting’s worth are numbered, and number four, dropped with really no explanation, is “the time of the artist’s death” (Edwards 10). We all know it’s true. But why? Sure, a dead artist ensures that the art is unique. If Landin isn’t around to produce anything else, every piece she made while she was alive is the only thing of its kind that will ever exist. But does uniqueness alone make art objectively valuable? What if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing to me? Do collectors collect just because the objects are rare? What do they get out of that? If we value art for how it makes us feel, and whether or not we like it viscerally, the way I think most people do, why can we all agree that a piece should be worth more just because the artist is dead?

The idea of selling Landin’s work almost directly from her Instagram account (an atmosphere I try to capture by embedding her posts in my own so that you can see the number of likes they received, when they were posted, etc.) was important to me. I want to emphasize that Landin’s art already has a life online, in the public eye, outside of my website. Potential buyers could have been interacting with the art I’m now selling from the time it was posted on her account, but they look at it through different eyes now because of the way it is packaged. The gallery Landin curated in her lifetime was strictly view-only. There was never any mention of selling her art. The viewing experience of my website, then, is inherently different because of the “Add to Cart” button you see beneath every piece. I invite the viewer to pass judgment on the art in a way Landin never did by providing space to wonder about the art’s value. I comment on how ridiculous the idea of automatic death-value seems to me by valuing individual pieces of Landin’s art somewhat arbitrarily.

As the self-appointed executor of Landin’s Instagram estate, I get to decide how much each piece should sell for. That’s definitely taking advantage – of her creation and of the platform she gave it online. Honestly, it’s taking advantage in a way that might get me arrested in real life, and is maybe not plausible, but it’s in service of an exploration of my second phenomenon.

I think people have much more of a tendency to impose themselves on the art of dead artists than of living ones. Often, I think we take a sort of ownership of dead artists’ work. We feel like what they’ve left behind offers some look into their heads, lives, or experiences. We try to understand the departed through the art they made when they were alive. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with interpretation. Art makes you feel the way it makes you feel, and that’s the point of it. I think the issue is when we decide to align the way we feel with the artist’s intent, or the artist’s subconscious. When we try to construct a narrative about the artist’s emotional life based on their work. It’s intrusive and presumptive, and a dead artist doesn’t get to talk back, or tell us where we’re right or wrong.

I’ve thought a lot about this kind of interpretation of dead people’s art in terms of a photo caption from Bell’s BBC article about death photography. The picture in question shows a blurry man and woman with their dead daughter, who is in sharp focus, and is captioned “Long exposures when taking photographs meant that the dead were often seen more sharply than the slightly-blurred living, because of their lack of movement” (Bell). I think that metaphorically, this is society’s attitude towards the dead. We romanticize dead people’s, especially dead artists’, problems and emotional turmoil, and have a morbid fascination with trying to understand them. We act as though death gives us license to intrude on someone’s life, like their absence brings a sort of clarity. Dead people are easier to understand in their “lack of movement,” because they can’t continue to act. If life is the painting of a mural that continues to get more complicated, then death makes the mural finite, and we can impose an interpretation on the picture we have that won’t be forced to change with new additions to the mural. The problem is that the mural wasn’t necessarily finished. The artist just stopped adding things. There’s no way for us to really know what the final project was intended to look like.

Kris Fallon argues in a chapter of Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism that Instagram defies the database model of photo-sharing that has existed for decades by inherently creating a narrative. Since photos are shared when they are taken, we go on a journey with the sharer. This is what is eerie about the social media accounts of the dead, I think. Like my mural analogy, an archived Instagram page is an abandoned narrative. By coopting Landin’s Instagram and imposing my own narrative on her art, I am inserting myself intimately into her life’s work in storytelling, an uncomfortable colonization.

On my website, I’m trying to overdo the overstepping. Instead of being set up like a typical gallery or online store, it runs like a blog, and I write a short post about every piece I’m selling. Those posts range from trying to find an uplifting theme in a piece that makes it seem heartwarming and likeable to using the art to justify accusations of deep emotional turmoil in Landin’s last few months alive. In one place on the About page, I claim that art with special sentimental value is not for sale or exhibited on the website. I want a visitor to the website to read that message and be confused by the pieces I have included. If I have so much to say about the ones I’m willing to sell, what could possibly be in the pieces I keep out of the public eye?  The point is that I’m interpreting whatever I want to from the art, no matter how shallow, far-fetched, or imagined, and speaking my interpretation like it’s profound truth.

The blog format makes the website more about me than about Landin. I tried to embody the selfish grief Phillips’ grief trolls target. As a blog, the exercise of trying to interpret Landin’s art becomes an attempted definition of my own relationship with her. That isn’t what a website marketed as a space for her honor and remembrance should do. This fault is near what some of Phillips’ trolls argue about people who post on Facebook memorial sites – they aren’t doing it to remember the dead, they’re doing it to draw attention to themselves. My website even has my name in the URL. That began as accidental – I needed it to be an offshoot of my Davidson Domain and I couldn’t figure out a way around the domain name – but I liked the way the problem centered me. I think we as a society are trying to figure out how to make public grief in the age of the internet appropriate. The biggest struggle is navigating how to honor someone with our private accounts, where we are the center of the world, without making the death about us. To comment on this issue, I wanted my website to really be about me.

In short, I want this project to be disturbing, and I want to come across as really wrong and unlikeable for having set up this website at all. I was careful to obtain Landin’s permission before embarking on the project, but it still felt wrong to kill her and manhandle her art like this. I am encouraged by the fact that public, exclamatory, profitable grief like this is uncomfortable for me. I hope the website will be uncomfortable for you.

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.

Edwards, M. D. “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” Art Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 1991, pp. 9–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3193261.

Fallon, Kris. “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY: INSTAGRAM AS INADVERTENT (FEMALE) AUTOBIOGRAPHY.” Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism, edited by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, pp. 9–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqx9f7.7.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.” First Monday[Online], 16.12 (2011).Web. 27 Mar. 2019

https://27-club-in-memoriam6.webnode.com

Like human culture itself, the human approach to death has evolved with the advent of new technology. Of particular note is the perception of death at the turn of the 19^thcentury, or as coined by scholar Philippe Ariès, the age of the death of the other. This era of death is largely characterized by a rapid increase in public memorialization of the deceased, focusing on the experience of the bereaved and a “certain romanticisation of death” (Graham, Arnold, Kohn & Gibbs, 4). A shift in thought similar to that of the 1800s is occurring in our generation, with the new phenomenon of online memorialization which has emerged within the last 10 years. Just as public memorials during the 19^thcentury expanded the grieving experiences to wider circles, online memorials are transcending the boundaries previously set in place regarding death and mourning. These memorials, which take form on various social media platforms and websites dedicated to remembering the deceased, are de-sequestering the grief process to remove the temporal, spatial, and social boundaries which previously contained and restricted the personal grief process, along with the death of the individual themselves (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 15). In this way, the phenomenon of death has become less individual, but communal; less temporal than enduring. These online memorials “support ongoing interaction between the living and the dead (‘an enduring and expanding space for the deceased’) …” as the “engagement of the senses by online memorials mean less exertion of the imagination by the living when memorializing, mitigating the lack of proximity between the physical body and the memorial” (Graham et al., 6). The ease with which an individual can “interact” with the deceased is much greater through an online memorial than through approaching a burial site. Further, as strange as it may be, part of the loss which is felt by the bereaved is the lack of presence of the deceased on digital platforms. However, this loss is minimized via online memorials, as they resemble communication with the living and “express continuing bonds with the dead.” As put by Graham et al. (2015), through online memorials, the dead are “playing a social role in society because of the internet and democratized memory-making.” Thus, the aesthetics of online memorials not only break down temporal, spatial, and social boundaries, but also give the dead a renewed “life” of their own. With this in mind, consider the meaning behind the memorial page at hand.

The present work, a memorial page dedicated exclusively to the 27 club, aims to highlight and reveal the strangeness of both the 27 club itself and the phenomenon of online memorials. Before discussing the design of the memorial page, however, it is necessary to examine the 27 club as an entity in its own right. There exists a purely coincidental mass of young, influential artists and musicians who have tragically died at the age of 27. Many of these members either lost their life to drugs and alcohol or took their own life through suicidal means. The notional club is not recognized by any organization, nor are there official parameters for induction. However, a certain degree of fame, following, and artistic influence seems to be implicit in becoming a member of the club, and obviously, dying at far too young an age. The irony of this club emerges in its exclusivity, in that it seems almost desirable to be inducted, despite the morbid qualifications. After the death of her son, Kurt Cobain’s mother reportedly said, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club,” (Sounes, 12) suggesting that there was talk of becoming a member before his death. In the case of Cobain and his suicide, this premeditation may seem plausible, but in the case of other “accidental” deaths, many speculators have interjected their own theories about induction into the club. In his book 27: A History of the 27 Club Through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, Howard Sounes speaks to how this “flippant, vulgar” term has come to be widely understood and is source of intrigue for many. The author mentions that while journalists are the biggest perpetrators of speculation and gossip, some fans have claimed that this club is not due to random events, or a pop culture rampant with drugs and mental illness, but rather that there are higher, supernatural powers at play in selecting and grouping these prominent artists. This intrigue of tragedy and death is not new, but rather fits the mold of the death of the other as described by Ariès in the 19^thcentury.

This romanticization of the 27 club death is further investigated in a senior thesis at Tulane entitled “Sells like Teen Spirit” by Bryce Berman, as he speaks about the ways in which those who survive these deceased figures have taken the club, and made it something of their own. As mentioned earlier, there seems to be an intrigue and cultural fascination with tragedy. Fans have come to conceptualize the deaths of these figures as honorable, “idolizing them for ‘dying for their art’ and for public consumption” (Berman, 10). This romantic ideal of dying for a cause, specifically their music, seems to dress up the death and mourning of these young artists despite their heat-breaking end.

While fans and followers are the usual individuals to commandeer the death of members of the 27 club, Berman exposes another, less obvious population of hijackers: managers and even the stars themselves. To die at the age of 27 and become a member of the club is to be memorialized and thus “metaphorically exhumed” (Berman, 13) alongside those greats such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones,  Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain. It is rare that death would be conceptualized as anything other than the end of a life, as it is still taboo despite cultural fixation. However, by way of Amy Winehouse as an example, Berman discusses how death at the age of 27 may actually be a business strategy. He explains that after the peak of Winehouse’s fame, her death had become “a predictable but compelling career move—a new-age deus ex-machina in which death can save the celebrity from disintegrated into the cultural abyss” (Berman, 17) Thus, Winehouse’s death, while still tragic, was “the perfect end to a scandalous life and the beginning of cultural exhumation by the media” (Berman, 17). The key word here, aside from “cultural exhumation” is “media.” The deaths of figures such as Hendrix and Joplin were consumed and appropriated by the public through newspaper, radio, and word of mouth. However, for those members of the club who have died in this generation of technology, the commodification of their death is significantly more apparent. With the phenomenon of online memorialization, not only can fans grieve all the more publicly and maintain their ties to the famed figures, but also managers and the stars themselves will experience massive publicity and media consumption.

I have attempted to create an example of such commodification via this online memorial page dedicated to the members of this exclusive 27 club. The home page of this website opens with the faces of the most prominent members of the club, reminding you immediately that they are within a club, and you are on the outside. As you scroll down, you will see the featured club member of the week, Jimi Hendrix (much like an employee of the month). There are YouTube videos specifically about Jimi and his performances, a few featured pictures, and a poll where visitors to the page can vote for their favorite Hendrix song. The pictures and videos are typical of online memorialization, as they allow for individuals to reminisce and relive performances through a lens. However, the poll (although I could not figure out how to make it work) is a way in which, even after the artist has passed, the public can still impose their opinions on their art. This is both an example of the “death of the other,” as it is not so much about the artist as it is about the fan, and the commodification of death, as these top-rated songs are that by which the artist will be remembered andthe songs which fans are most likely to purchase/listen to. Other tabs are dedicated to conventional aspects of memorial pages; A biography page outlines Hendrix’s life, a discography page documents his lasting legacy as a musician, and a memories page on which fans can post their experiences regarding the artist. The memories page, of course, is again for the fans and those who grieve Jimi’s death, demonstrating further the death of the other and the emphasis of the experience of those whom the artist left behind, rather than the deceased himself. Finally, the VIP access page, is the ultimate example of the commodification of death as manifested by online memorial pages. In order to be a part of an exclusive group, in a way similar to that of the 27 club, viewers must register for a monthly fee. This money-making strategy capitalizes off of the grief of fans, their need to demonstrate their fandom, and their desire to be a part of an exclusive group.

In sum, online memorialization has produced a process of centophisation, or a shift in “beliefs about death and how the living should engage with the dead… ‘so that in their new state of being dead, the deceased can be envisaged as in life; doing and being, in familiar or longed-for places that the bereaved can also envisage and may share” (Graham et al., 4). This is exactly the purpose of the online memorial page for the 27 club which I have created, as fans are able to re-experience their memories, or quasi memories, through media. What is unique about my memorial page is the demographic of the deceased who are featured on the page. The core irony lies in the exclusivity of the 27 club—that in order to be inducted you must die tragically at the age of 27. The 27 club itself may be a business strategy, commodifying the death of young artists who have no better career move. However, the nature of the club paired with the phenomenon of online memorialization highlights not only the shifting, and strange attitudes regarding death in our society, but also the infiltration of greed into the one of the most sensitive aspects of human life: death.

References

Berman, B. (2018). Sells like teen spirit: The commodification of the addicted artist. ResearchGate. Tulane University. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20320.17920

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.

Grahman, C., Arnold, M., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M.R. (2015). Gravesites and website: a comparison of memorialization. Visual Studies, 30(1), 37-53.

Sounes, H. (2013). 27: A history of the 27 club through the lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix,Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

My Haunted Media project stemmed from the question of how our modern world would respond to past/historical deaths. We have focused in class on how responses, or at least the mechanisms of carrying out those responses, have changed as digitization pervades. I focused on Princess Diana, whose sudden death in 1997 elicited worldwide mourning as the internet increased digital access exponentially; I chose this case due to that context as well as that of Diana herself. Since her romance with royalty, Diana lived under constant observation, tempered by wide perception of her as a narrative rather than as herself, contextualizing her death as the finale of a story. These phenomena in mind, I developed a fan website of Princess Diana, of which a surprising amount exist in reality even today, and designed peoples’ reaction, through the website, to her demise in real-time.

Press coverage of Princess Diana happens today, showcasing a fascination with her, and tends largely toward her appearance and her emotional problems, objectified elements that I pursued in my site through the inclusion of a “Shopping” page to link visitors to where they may purchase clothes like Diana’s, and in what news prior to that concerning her death I included. Every source I could find explaining Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles painted him unflinchingly as a villain. While I have no intimate experience with the Charles and so cannot say what role he did or did play in driving the split, neither do most of these legitimate commentators. Victimizing Diana by framing him as an aggressor maintains an innocence ascribed to Diana that seems largely to extend from her gender. Barbara Creed wrote in her book The Monstrous Feminine that much horror has emerged from “…the inability of the male order to control the woman whose perversity is expressed through her rebellious body,” (Creed 34). The woman, in this case Diana, needs to be acted upon rather than active to preserve patriarchal integrity. Thus, I described her throughout my site in passive terms, those that would please others interacting with her as opposed to benefitting her in any potential ambition of her own. The obsession with her appearance became a “Shopping” page, in which visitors to the site can find clothes for purchase like those Diana has worn. This element ties into the consumerism of digital culture, too, as the presentation of everything happens in a context of whether or not those concerned have, want or need, or can obtain each thing. Further, I delved into the concern over Diana’s sex life. Prior to carrying out research, I did not know Diana had divorced from Prince Charles or dated other men since; people seem invested in maintaining her as a chaste, traditional woman, continually calling her “Princess Diana” and badmouthing both Charles and Diana’s subsequent boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed. Some believe that Diana was pregnant, despite not being married to him, with Al-Fayed’s child at the time of her death. Prior to the fatal car crash, there had been no public speculation about another Diana pregnancy. Controversy about it heightens hysteria in reaction to her death; the idea may have been purposely leaked—or created—by news outlets. I incorporated the anxiety over Diana’s childbearing into my website’s news post after Diana’s death, a list of conspiracy theories (of which many exist) trying to make sense of the situation. These proliferations and the placement of them on my site, after the previous article confirming Diana’s death closed with a note that no or little more news will be published here, indicate several things. First, humans cannot simply escape their emotions, responses to news like that of this death, and so on by wishing to do so, and we crave fame and belonging. Meghan Garber wrote in her article Enter the Grief Police how, especially as facilitated by digitization, mourners reach out to each other and showcase how sad they are, (Garber). I addressed such a notion in my “Bulletin Board” page, on which the comments of website visitors tend, now, toward performative grief. Diana’s gender definitively structured reactions to her demise. Significantly, this structure reminded me of that concerning Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Diana functions as a character for the public to project onto, as many celebrities do. Modern civilization, specifically British in this case, exists symbiotically with a socioeconomic patriarchy threatened by changes of agency. In Hamlet and in Diana Spencer’s instance, the jeopardy or perceived jeopardy of feminine acting with male qualities (Ophelia’s literal loss of chastity, Diana’s love life outside of her ex-husband and the resulting suspicion of her unwedded pregnancy) prompts obsession, (Shakespeare). Royals have died before. Even women tainted both by divorce and by closeness to the English royal family, like Princess Margaret and Wallis Simpson, have died before and not garnered the lingering response that Diana has. Her appearance, stylized and real, has perhaps contributed to the especial attention paid to Diana, as her sudden death preserved her as young and beautiful—again, like Ophelia. I paid attention to the discrepancies of opinions concerning Diana versus her contemporaries or predecessors in how I designed my website. I used pastel and complimentary colors, as well as traditional fonts, to convey a sense of conservatively pleasing aesthetics; further, I chose pictures of Diana that emphasized the demure, ladylike persona ascribed to her. I analyzed Diana’s objectification in my construction of the worldwide event her death became.

Next, I focused on making the website realistic. This phase of research included reading more news coverage from her life and afterwards and visiting several, real Diana fan sites to guide organization and aesthetics; I also instituted features like terms and conditions, a privacy policy, and relevant filler text to introduce pages. Though I had and have no attention to create an actual mourning place for Diana, I wanted to make it as indistinguishable from one as possible, save for designating it as my Haunted Media Project at the top of the homepage in case anyone outside our class does stumble onto the site. Otherwise, I did, in fact, find myself creating a real place of mourning. Do motivations change results? I worked as a character besides myself in an attempt to explore what those obsessed with Diana (or any dead celebrity) might feel; thus emerged a tightening of tone throughout the website. I littered text with reminders that any post must be Diana-related and offered opportunities to subscribe, as well as detailed my Shopping page. While I do not ship out anything purchased from the Shopping area, users of the site go through every motion of doing so, from adding items to a cart, inputting their billing and shipping information, and receiving confirmation. My focus in this area derived not only from the cult around Diana’s gender but also from the existence of these sales in our society. By that, I mean that humans treat appearance as signifiers of status; most style themselves for reasons other than basic protection from natural hazards. The London Spectator newspaper published as early as 1922, decades before Diana, an article describing legal battles over “…what a woman who lives ‘in Society’ (sic) ought to spend on her clothes,” (Spectator). The unnamed author allows that women- specifically women, bringing up gender once again by their shunning to mention male aesthetics of performativity- may feel compelled to express emotions through their clothes, but, in doing so, ultimately sacrifice usefulness to the world, the exact definition of which this author never states but implies pertains to bettering the lifestyles of the poor. The British royal family, while generally viewed positively or at least with ambivalence in today’s world and Diana’s world, represents privilege and socioeconomic unfairness bluntly. Perhaps the family’s members’ involvement in philanthropy aims to mitigate that image? Much of Diana’s 80%+ approval rate arose from her closeness to citizenry, propagated through her work “…as president or patron of over 100 charities,” (Diana Award). I reflected directly in the “What Really Happened” news post on the concentrations of power regarding the British elite, how Diana differentiated herself from them, and how they simultaneously cast suspicion (however irrational) and absolved of engineering malevolence like Diana’s death onto the royal family. An inordinate amount of conspiracy theories exist about the crash which ended Diana’s life. Most, if not all of these frame either the royal family or other wealthy and powerful individuals as culprits. When mourning Diana, to what extent is someone actually mourning the perceived loss of overt class separation? Our class has discussed how people can feel they know, even intimately, celebrities who they probably have actually never met. This commercialism of people, then, prompts our desire to emulate them, encouraging everything from the phenomenon of influencers to sales of merchandise to basing trends on those set by people in power. Humans want to become as close as possible if not simply to become those they idolize, and the mechanism to achieve this end in modernity lies in buying and selling. Thus came my Shopping page, geared toward customers who want to dress like Diana. Finally, I edited my news posts with an eye toward the tones of real super-fans who I read writings from and watched videos of. I distinguished between the roles of the website creators/moderators and of visitors who participate with my website, their level of participation marked by whether they subscribe. Save for my name and the title of this project listed on the upper left part of the layout, I tried to and, I believe, strongly succeeded in making a realistic mourning website—if not a real mourning website.

The internet had but recently begun to spread in accessibility at the time of Princess Diana’s demise. As such, the world concentrated their collective grief, emphasized by the narratives of this specific woman, into other media and manifestations, including multiple, physical memorials. Further digitization has furthered connectivity between fame, economy, emotion, and socialization; I analyzed how this has changed grief through creating this website for my Haunted Media Project.

Works Cited

Creed, Barbara. “Woman as Possessed Monster.” The Monstrous Feminine, www.dropbox.com/s/d2ado1o12n3azy1/Creed – Woman as Possessed Monster.pdf?dl=0.

DiNuzzo, Emily. “The Truth Behind the Theory That Princess Diana Was Pregnant at the Time of Her Death.” Reader’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, 18 Feb. 2019, www.rd.com/culture/princess-diana-death-pregnancy-theory-truth/.

Epstein, Rachel. “8 Gorgeous Royal Wedding Dresses to Shop for Your Big Day.” Marie Claire, Marie Claire, 21 May 2018, www.marieclaire.com/fashion/g19754996/royal-wedding-dresses-to-shop-now/.

Garber, Meghan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/.

Kelly, Ben. “How Princess Diana’s Death Was Broken in the Pre-Social Media World.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 30 Aug. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/news-princess-diana-death-pre-social-media-world-a7917366.html.

Mallinson, Harriet. “Prince Charles: What REALLY Happened on His Mediterranean Honeymoon with Princess Diana.” Express.co.uk, Express.co.uk, 9 Jan. 2019, www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1069189/prince-charles-princess-diana-honeymoon.

Macfarlane, Jo. “Book Revealing ‘Explosive Truth’ about Diana and Dodi Axed.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 13 Aug. 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4785272/Book-revealing-explosive-truth-Diana-Dodi-axed.html.

McHugh, Catherine. “Remembering Princess Diana: How the People’s Princess Changed the World.” Biography.com, A&E Networks, 31 Aug. 2017, www.biography.com/news/princess-diana-death-legacy.

“Princess Diana.” Princess Diana Legacy, dianaslegacy.co.uk/.

Russell, Jenni. “Diana Saved the Queen.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/sunday/princess-diana-britain-monarchy.html.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Dover Publications, 1992.

“The Best Style Moments of Princess Diana.” Southern Living, www.southernliving.com/fashion-beauty/princess-diana-style.

“THE FETISH OF CLOTHES.” The Spectator Apr 15 1922: 455. ProQuest. Web. 27 Mar. 2019 .

“Top 10 Suspicious Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Princess Diana.” Terrific Top 10, 25 Sept. 2018, terrific-top10.com/2018/09/24/top-10-suspicious-circumstances-surrounding-the-death-of-princess-diana/.

A quick survey of recent works of true crime across multiple mediums suggests a growing interest in using audio elements. Examples include Netflix’s docuseries Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019), Audible’s audiobook Evil Has a Name: The Untold Story of the Golden State Killer Investigation (2018) and the podcast Serial produced by Sarah Koenig(2014). These all readily come to mind as examples of true crime narratives that rely heavily on auditory components and also enjoyed some sort of virality after being released. They all use voice recordings of first-hand witnesses to crimes; witnesses and accuses perpetrators alike bear testimony and get to tell their story in their own voice. Media producers are smart to use audio in their productions. Voice recordings create a sense of intimacy and immediacy and place the speaker in the room with the viewer/listener in an unavoidable way.

My inspiration for this project was threefold. First, I was inspired by the first two projects, which looked at some of the previously mentioned true crime shows that privilege audio, such as Evil Has a Name and Conversations with a Killer. Second, I drew inspiration for another project I did this semester that utilized the Makey Makey technology to bring photos to life with the voices of their subject. Third, I was inspired by some of our class readings.

Makey Makey demo

One reading in particular, Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone (Zarrelli 2016) helped me draw connections between the projects that inspired this one. In that article, the idea of eerie technology that captured the interest many inventors 20^thcentury, Edison in particular. He tried to create a spirit phone that would allow people to communicate with the dead. In many ways, his ideas about “chatting with ghosts” have lived on (Zarrelli 2016). In many ways, we’ve become more conditioned to hearing the voices of the dead thanks to modern technology that has us listening to songs long after artists have passed. In a more personal way, we’ve discussed in class how people often save and continue to listen to voicemails that deceased loved ones left then. These examples are less eerie than Edison’s original idea, so I wanted to use technology to make the phenomenon of hearing voices from the dead in a more jarring way. To do this, I turned to society’s most eerie people: murderers.

My Haunted Media Project is a mock museum exhibit about some of the most famous murderers, many of them serial murderers and many of them already dead. It’s an interactive exhibit where the photographs come to life with the voices of their subject. Touch the photo frame (in this museum, touching the exhibits is allowed) and you’ll hear the voice of the murderer himself. Touch all of them in succession, and you can make a creepy chorus of killers.

To do this, I used a Makey Makey. I framed pictures of murderers with conductive tape and hooked them up to various keys on the Makey Makey. Next, I found the eeriest voice recordings I could and used Scratch to link them to Makey Makey commands, thus bringing the photos to life with the voices of their inhabitants.

The Makey Makey allowed me to create a museum exhibit with an “enriched interpretive experience,” as discussed by Ruecker and Roberts-Smith in “Experience Design for the Humanities: Activating Multiple Interpretations” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities(2017). Nowadays, interactivity is almost expected by museum patrons. People are used to having audio guides that lead them through a museum, usually using headphones. However, these voices that accompany patrons are often ones of objective authority. I subvert this by giving voice to the subjects of the exhibit, criminals who frighten us and we wish to keep at a distance.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without technology, which has the power to enhance audience experience because it operates “in parallel to embodied, material experiences,” communicates “expert interpretations,” and allows “audiences to customize” exhibits (Ruecker and Roberts-Smith 2017). In my project, the technology (the Makey Makey) creates an embodied experience by invoking the murderer’s physical presence though their voice. It offers expert interpretations through first-hand accounts, though those are of course susceptible to bias. The technology also allows the audience to customize their experience by choosing which pictures to touch, and how many times they wish to repeat the message.

Another piece of technology that this project relies on is the recent advancements of audio recordings. Preserving 911 calls and voicemails wasn’t always possible and was motivated in part by a court case 35 years ago that provided the precedent for them being used as evidence (United States v. McMillan). In addition to lawyers, media producers have also recognized and capitalized on the affordances of voice recordings. Podcasts and other recorded voice mediums allow for intimacy with the characters by putting them directly in your ear. As mentioned in Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations by Ewan Kirkland, many hypermediated horror will use audio elements such as telephones, radio, and cassettes. They provide an “economic means of conveying backstory… and confer document reality.” In addition, they use “audiovisual effects of technological breakdown as signifiers of a ghostly, evil, or threatening presence.” In many ways, my project builds on these same tactics. The murderers twisted personalities are quickly portrayed in their voices and they make the photo seem even more realistic by providing a more holistic representation of a person. They’re also a bit scratchy and hard to understand, which feels especially eerie because it contributes to the elusiveness and mysteriousness that murderers often thrive on.

I meant for my project to highlight the morbid fascination that our society has with true crime. Murders are horrific, gruesome, despicable acts – yet we are avid consumers of narratives about them. True crime novels, TV/movies, and podcasts have expansive audiences. There is even a category on Netflix specifically for “Binge-Worthy True Crime.” The idea that we would want to binge on the horror is ironic because serial killers are also binging on creating the crime that interests us.

There are reasons that motivate us to consume this type of media, though. The first is the adrenaline rush. Horror, especially true crime, makes us feel as if we’re in a near-death situation and gives us the same rush of adrenaline as other thrills, such as roller coasters. We see it as an encounter with something life-threatening, and our body acts appropriately. Audio elements, because of the intimacy they provoke, only serve to heighten this.

A study by Vicary and Fraley explored different motivations of a true crime audience, particularly women, in their study Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers? (2010). One motivation of the audience that they found was a desire to learn survival and defense tactics. There is an evolutionary advantage to understanding a killer’s motives and how to protect yourself, and true crime often provides this, even if just by detailing how a crime was committed. Another motivation was a psychological interest in understanding the mind of a killer because they are usually suffering from an uncommon mental illness such as psychopathy. Interestingly, women, despite being the less violent sex, were more drawn to the genre. They suggested that this may be because women are more likely to fear being victims of a violent crime and therefore foresee a bigger advantage to consuming true crime. In addition, often the victims in true crime are women, creating empathy and personal investment in female audiences.

The museum exhibit, then, creates voyeurism of murders and horror that capitalizes on society’s interest in the macabre. It points out the morbid fascination by making it a focal point of a museum exhibit. Furthermore, it’s an interactive, performative exhibit that uses audio and the amicably-named technology Makey Makey to do so. The inherent playfulness in the technology’s name was also an obvious inspiration for my exhibit’s ironic and paradoxical exhibit’s name.

The visual presentation of my project was very deliberate. Obviously, a real museum exhibit would be much more extensive and could include many more serial killers and larger pictures. I was limited by certain materials (the amount of programmable keys on a Makey Makey, the size corkboard I had). I wanted to recreate a detective’s evidence board that connects photos of potential pieces of evidence with strings, creating a physical mind map of the investigation. Though the exhibit doesn’t focus on one particular case or investigation, I think that this remediation is in line with other forms of True Crime that try to replicate police operations. Often, interviews with characters mimic the style of when a suspect is questioned with a single spotlight and other tactics meant to encourage a moral judgment. Though the board is much more technologically advanced than the evidence boards I am remediating, I think that they show the extents that we’re willing to go to in order to understand a killer. I also think that creating a physical object that relies on technology rather than a wholly digital project underlines the inextricable ways that our lives are intertwined with the digital. Just like how our possessions must be reconciled with after we die, the digital legacies we leave behind can be just as complicated for loved ones to deal with.

In conclusion, I was inspired by the rising popularity of true crime coupled with the rise of voice recording in the media. I capitalized on the technological affordances of the Makey Makey and voice recordings to make an interactive museum exhibit that creates an enriched interpretive experience by embodying the subjects of the pictures that make up the exhibit. The subjects voices create immediacy and intimacy as some of society’s most abhorrent figures attempt to tell their own story.

Works Cited

Kirkland, E. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 115–126., doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.

Reucker, Stan, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith. “Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 259–270.

Vicary, Amanda M., and R. Chris Fraley. “Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 81–86., doi:10.1177/1948550609355486.

Zarrelli, Natalie. “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone.” Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 20 Oct. 2016, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone.