The Master of Arts in Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Presents
A Montgomery Lecture
With
Molly Hales, MD, PhD
Instructor, Biological Sciences Division
University of Chicago
Animating the Virtual Bodies of the Dead
In Chicago, a high school teacher finds herself drawn again and again to her late brother’s Facebook profile page, hypnotized by the shifting content that animates and re-animates him. In northern California, a woman logs entries in a self-made smartphone app that records moments when her mother suddenly becomes present. In Britain, a young woman repeatedly visits the online memorial that hypnotically submerses her in memories of her dead friend. As digital media offer novel ways to presence and re-presence the dead, both the living and the dead are haunted in new ways, shifting relationships to both media and death. This talk explores death and digital media through the story of Mike and Alex, best friends who embark on an ambitious plan to recreate Mike’s late father as an avatar in virtual reality. Using online and offline participant-observation, serial interviews, media analyses, and auto-ethnography, I show how the intimacy between Mike and his late father is made possible by the mediating presence of his friend Alex, by the virtual reality platform, and by the wider social and therapeutic field that has shaped how such technologies are understood and accessed. The qualities of depth, immersion, and presence around which virtual reality has defined itself opened up a space for George to grow into something more than a cartoon, providing the locus of an ongoing relation with his son. Their story invites us to reconsider the frontiers of intimacy, the fragmentation of identity and relationality in a digitally-mediated age, and emergent post-death rituals in the United States and beyond.
This lecture is open to the public and will be held in the Searle Seminar Room in the Lurie Research Building (303 E Superior St), Chicago Campus. For those outside the Chicago area and anyone who would prefer to attend remotely, a Zoom option is also available.
Only Zoom attendees are required to register
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Cost: free!
Myria Knox
(312) 503-7962
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