Holograms/Holographic Projections : Ghosts Amongst the Living; Ghosts of the Living

Abstract

This chapter explicates holographic projections as the second instantiation of post-screen media. Often mistaken as holograms, these projections of images ranging from Tupac to Julian Assange to holographic protests redraw the boundaries between life and death, and enable a re-imagination of ghosts, deadness, aliveness and afterlife. The chapter argues for four different moments in a history of ghosts in the media: resurrection; necrophilia; necromancy; and interactivity. The last facilitates spectral life in the post-screen through considering holographic projections of both dead and living figures. In relation to the dead, the post-screen becomes a space in limbo between deadness and aliveness; in relation to the living, the realness of the holographic body stretches in a tetravalence across dual axes of actual/virtual and here/elsewhere, and enlivened in what I call vivification. In these 3D displays on the post-screen of resurrected and vivified bodies, different kinds of life, afterlife and after-death emerge.