Sound, Virtualisation and The Future of Mourning

“A world of privatized knowledge patrolled and defended by rating agencies. Of maximum control coupled with intense conformism, where intelligent cars do grocery shopping until a Hellfire missile comes crashing down. Police come knocking on your door for a download— to arrest you after “identifying” you on YouTube or CCTV. They threaten to jail you for spreading publicly funded knowledge? Or maybe beg you to knock down Twitter to stop an insurgency? Shake their hands and invite them in. They are today’s internet in 4D.”

- Steyerl, 2013, para. 13.

On virtual platforms, individuals could express their identities in online social contexts. And then the pandemic came, and we slipped further into the online world, becoming entirely immersed in our online representations. So, if the virtual world is such a core part of who we are, do we ever really die as long as our data still exists? Hito Steyerl peers through a pixelated lens into a world where the online and physical realities have melted into one another. A world not so far from reach. Let's explore the realistic experience of the virtual online world, and reimagine the role future technologies, including A.I., databanks and VR, could one day change the meaning of death. Enjoy a fun little introduction to works that inspired Virtual Graves, touching on virtuality, memory and death.

Upon my placement with Tobar an Dualchais, I found myself handling the recordings of so many individuals who had passed away, and yet they were so alive in my mind. They were vibrant and funny and it felt as if I was in their bodies, tasting their tea and breathing the same air as them. A particular recording that caught my eye was by Annie Johnston, depicted her imitating the sounds of birds with her mouth. It is a strangely intimate recording, listening to the flick and click of her lips and the low rumble of her vocal chords. It is beautiful. She is life-like. And she is dead. An article released by Mairi McFadyen, about the importance of remembering those in the archives, stated “language and its creative expression through song, story, poetry and rhymes such as these encodes human experience and memory." The software coding breathed life back into these people who are long gone, and made them feel so tangible. They felt like they were within reach. Annie Johnstone may be dead, but her voice is very much alive in our memories thanks to technology. Michel Serres discusses the way in which the body processes sound, and how that breaths them into existence. He believes that life "exploits this distinction, moving from hardness to softness. Its momentum carries it from hardware to software, from energy to information. The sensible moves in the same direction. It is through the sensible that the body recognizes the interval between the two and the direction in which we are carried." Annie Johnstone may be dead, but her voice is very much alive in our memories thanks to technology.

Forest 404, which I have previously explored on this Same Frequency, follows Pearl Mackie's character as she discovers audio recordings of a rainforest that no longer exist in a future where nature has long gone. The podcast is able to demonstrate the ways in which we subconsciously relate and connect to sound, even when we don't recognise or haven't encountered it before. We have an ability as human to recognise the sounds of nature and humans, even if we don't speak the language, through little more than the tenderness of listening to them. Forest 404 attempts to help us explore our relationship to nature in a world where speed and data are highly valued. Bird sound and synthesisers interweave with speech, saying more than the voice actors ever could.

Let us take a look at the border between reality and fiction in VR, by delving into a study of sensory perception. An often recreated experiment, the rubber hand illusion was originally developed in 1998 by Botvinik and Cohen to see how the human mind related to virtual environments and avatars. The participant sat with one hand obscured from their line of sight, and a virtual hand (originally rubber, but in later versions an augmented reality replica) placed in its place. If their 'real' hand was stroked, out of sight, at the same time as the virtual one that they could see, the participant would associate the sensation with the fake hand and begin to identify it as a part of their physical body. This study was a fun peak into how our virtual surrounding and body can become a part of our identity.

The creators of the Virtual Code of Ethics, Professors Madary and Metzinger reflected on the ethical issues of Botvinik and Cohen's experiment; stating "these results can be taken together as empirical premises for an argument stating not only that there may be unexpected psychological risks if illusions of embodiment are misused, or used recklessly, but that, if we are interested in minimizing potential damage and future psychosocial costs, these risks are themselves ethically relevant. (Madary and Metzinger, 2016.) The professors identify that such spaces need policies to keep them safe for users, which contain clear guidelines as to how to navigate these platforms. So, what commentary does the creative world have to add about this theory...?

Players of Bandersnatch always reach the most gruelling choice in the binary-flagging-system of the interactive Netflix film; ‘Stefan’ or ‘Colin.’ Before asking audiences to choose who to kill, Colin, played by Will Poulter, off-loads an intense monologue: "Do you know what PAC stands for? P-A-C: "Program and Control". He's Program and Control Man, the whole thing's a metaphor, he thinks he's got free will, but really he's trapped in a maze, in a system, […] and even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side." (Bandersnatch, 2018) Why is this relevant? Well, just as he reveals all decisions are decided for us, he asks us as viewers to use this power over the characters to kill one of them. This story constantly plays with its own structure. Telling the characters they have power over their own narrative, and yet handing that power to the viewers. Telling the viewers they have control over the characters, and yet forcing them to choose between two awful options they would never want. Audiences cannot progress without abandoning their own moral compass, and as the characters react with such anguish and scream "who are you?!" into the camera lens, Charlie Brooker asks us to question the degree to which our real and unreal can be manipulated to the point of being indistinguishable. The deaths in this story are so fictional and yet so real, because of the immersion of viewer and story.

If the world around us is an interweaving series of digital and physical experiences, then we can begin to imagine how death weaves its way into this arguments. Maybe, as Hito Steyerl suggests, we will one day see the loading bar hit 100%, signalling for our mind and bodies' upload to the cloud where we all go to move on. As life has become forever intangible, so has death and they are forever intertwining to create a world that is both data and earth. Where our bodies decay, and our data erodes.

Thank you for reading. Please do feel free to message on the feedback section if you have any thoughts, queries or other works that interest you.

Maya Chillingworth

Cited Works:

Atak, T, X. (2019). Ep0: Enter the Forest. [Podcast]. Forest 404. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p074ltg8 (Accessed 30, Mar 2021)

Barreau, P. (2018). How AI could compose a personalized soundtrack to your life. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYb3Wimn01s (Accessed 30. Mar 2021)

Bandersnatch. (2018). [Film].London: David Slade.

Botvinik, M and Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/35784 (Accessed 30. Mar 2021)

Campbell, J, L. (1950). Cànan Nan Eun. [Audio recording]. Edinburgh: The National Trust of Scotland.

Serres, M. (1985). The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. 1st Ed.

Steyerl, H. (2013). Too Much World: Is The Internet Dead? In: e-flux journal, No. 7. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/ (Accessed 30 Mar. 2021)

Madary, M and Metzinger, T. (2016). Real Virtuality: A code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for good Scentific Practise and the Consumers of VR-Technology. In: Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 3:3. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00003