This isn't the article that I was looking for, but it is for the same invention. What are your thoughts on a talking tombstone? I can't remember exactly where it was mentioned in the book, but I know it came up somewhere.
This has to be my favorite comment of the ones on BBC News' site.
"Imagine if all the graves were just looping video. At night, you would just here this continuous distant murmuring sound coming from the church, as all the dead seemingly chat away to each other! Creepy."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Re: Jumping on the Morbidity Bandwagon
This is really bizarre, and fascinating, Nikki.
I’ve contemplated looking at cemetery rhetoric as manifested through gravestones, but these talking stones would take it to a new level. I think the writing in this particular site (cemeteries) is oddly intriguing.
While certainly some stones simply have a name and dates, many include a relationship, i.e. beloved father. I’m a little (morbidly) curious about which relationship gets privileged in this permanent inscription, and why. I assume there are both economic and practical components, in that it has something to do with who is picking out the stone and signing the check.
Beyond this though, there are choices being made about color and type of stone, which bring out other economic issues, as well as issues of durability of the technology. For instance, there are quite a few stones for infants and young children in a particular cemetery I visit, which are made of a white stone which erodes significantly in a fairly short time. These stones have a lamb seated on top, which unfortunately begins to look as if it is melting. See this link for more about gravestone symbols, if you’re interested: http://www.graveaddiction.com/symbol.html
By the way, here’s an association which works to promote the appreciation of cemeteries and their cultural significance: http://www.gravestonestudies.org/faq.htm
Andy Kaufman says, "Hi! Let's have some milk and cookies!"
At his funeral, he had his closest friends play a pre-recorded video he made as a way of saying farewell. Undeniably cool--at least I think so.
Are video taped wills similar to this?
Would any of you be willing to do this, or having a "living" tombstone? I would.
E.
Nikki, this is really interesting. I think the part in the book that your talking about is where Edison notes that the dead can now speak since their words can be captures on the phonograph. Only this is such an interesting take on the dead speaking. It reminds me of the Illiad and common notions about writing that it will immortalize the author as long as people continue to circulate and read the work. However, the rhetoric of immortality has a paradoxical logic of temporality. Just like we read literature in the present tense (when we refer to it we always use present tense pronouns), the dead’s voice is really the present tense of an act made long ago. The same thing with video wills (a common pop cultural reference for this is in Scream 3). Here the present is engaged with another present that happened in the past. The presentness of the recording (whether human voice through the phonograph or the body and voice through the video camera) is only an illusion. Immortality is, obviously, not achieved despite its rhetorical move to make the past seem like the present. Furthermore, the rhetoric of immortality suggests a kind of perpetual progress into the future. However, there is no progress in the static form of recorded media.
Gitelman makes the point again and again about the materiality, especially the visualization, of sound. For instance, she states that “Sound was an object” (64) and her idea of “textual materiality” (74). This idea is represented also in her notions of the idea letters and intellectual property. The writers of idea letters “perceived ideas as property, private and personal, with little sense of collectivity and no recognition of the inevitability avowed by so man contemporary paeans to progress” (81). This notion of inevitable progress seems related to the rhetoric of immortality. Within the rhetoric time extends in a now dead life (a once present) to the actual present. The paradox of present on present should seem like white on white. However, that’s not the meaning according to this temporal logic. The logic, in this instance, co-opts presentness creating its illusion from past events in the actual present. There is a temporal distance that is closed in doing this, which, as we travel further into the future (the next present), widens at every moment. This growing gap is conflated, and devoured (seeming to not exist), by the rhetoric of immortality with its corresponding sense of progress. Wow! I feel like I just came off of a trip (lol and I’ve never even done any sort of hallucinagen). I guess this is what sleep deprivation does to you. Now I can commiserate with Eliot.
Anybody see the movie _Final Cut_? Creepy. Mostly because Robin Williams is creepy in the movie, but also because he makes "final cut" movies to show at funerals. The movies are cut from an implant placed in the deceased person's brain which has recorded his or her life.
Kind of a tangent, but this discussion reminds me of the death mask "tradition" where a person's face was used to make a plaster mask. The death mask was done, for example, after the person died. The life mask was done while the person was alive.
See John Keats' masks below:
http://nicholadeane.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/keatss-life-mask-keatss-death-mask/
I think this is a pre-photographic mode of representation, memorial or perhaps for some other reason.
Post a Comment