Here's the full responses I sent to Owen a week or two ago:
My gut insta-reaction is that it’s a new
way for the old to tyrannize the young – because you can’t get any older than
being dead. So the next step beyond the reunion tours, and all the legacy acts
that dominate festival line-ups, is the hologram tour: no longer alive artists
extending their brand power beyond the grave.
The syndrome raises all kinds of ethical
and philosophical questions. To what extent are these performances in
any real sense, given that a performance (whether showbiz entertainment or performance
art) is by definition live, involving the unmediated presence of living
performers, whereas the hologram tours are “unlive” and involve
non-presence?
On an ethical and economic level, I would liken
it to a form of “ghost slavery”. That applies certainly when done without the
consent of the star, by the artist’s estate in collusion with the record
company or tour promoter.
But even if an artist might consent while still alive
and legally grant the posthumous rights to their image, voice, etc, for
exploitation, that doesn’t make it right or proper. Nor does the fact that
there might be a consumer demand for this make it a wholesome development.
It’s a
form of unfair competition: established stars continuing their market
domination after their death and stifling the opportunities for new artists.
It’s reminiscent of Marx on capital as the spectral vampire of dead labour, which when living and working had surplus value sucked out of it and then turned into yet more finance capital, thereby continuing the dominion over and exploitation of living
labour for generations to come. But it’s Das Kapital crossed with Freud’s writings about the uncanny.
Hologram tours are very much an extension
of the syndromes discussed in Retromania. I don’t think they existed as more
than a rumour when I was writing the book - there might be a brief mention of
them in there. But I do discuss the idea of movie stars being reanimated and
how that was happening then already with figures like Audrey Hepburn being used in
commercials using digital trickery.
It does seem like another facet to
this that will soon be possible is that the technology will emerge such that the vocal timbre and mannerisms, the
facial expressions and bodily gestures, conversational speech patterns, etc etc, of performers can be captured
digitally - through assimilating and analysing the sum total of all their existing recordings, performances, videos, films, etc etc - and that you will get a sort of digi-simulacrum of the artist
singing new songs, guesting as vocalist or rapper on other people’s records,
appear in videos or movies etc. That seems totally conceivable to me. The
simulacrum would probably not be able to do convincing spontaneous stage banter
or appear on chat shows, but who knows? In those circumstances, they
could be remotely ventriloquized by someone offstage, so that that person’s
voice – or even written text – would be spoken by the simulacrum’s real-seeming
voice. In the recording studio, you’d just need the software which would
generate the voice, or the instrumental performance.
No, I think there’s a greater dimension
of wish-fulfillment and suspension of disbelief. The spectators are allowing
themselves to half-believe that they are in the presence of the star. That’s
why it’s like a ghost – a ghost could be defined as a “present absence”,
neither here nor there, neither now nor then, but in some ontologically queasy
interzone between being and nonbeing.
It’s eerie, it’s fascinating, it’s
troubling.
