Photography can no longer represent our identity. Our identity can no longer be represented by the two-dimensional flat surface of a photographic image alone. Photography has had its day. The photograph as a referent of our identity will be replaced by an AI Hologram.
In the 21st-century digital world, our identity is represented by multiple forms of technology. In addition to photography — digital video, social media posts, text messaging, and online writing — artificial intelligence is designed to replicate and converse with us. Taken together they form a fuller picture of who we are. From this online data, a narrative is constructed to produce a multimedia autobiography rather than a single portrait but one that is still limited to one-way interaction. Two-way interactive technology will be possible and affordable and easy to use and a fully interactive machine-learning AI hologram will replace the portrait photograph.
We are no more equipped to deal with grief after bereavement than any of our ancestors and our greatest flaw drives technology to find ways to represent who we are and how we interact with our dead. Academics writing before 2001 were fearful of the social, moral, and religious implications proposed by digital immortality and that issues surrounding grief and bereavement are an afterthought for technology designers. Similar to the doubters of the emergence of photography in the 19th century, they are consigned to history in a pre-smartphone social media world and are caught up in the how and not the why. Why is the digital afterlife of a person any different than the afterlife of an embellished photograph or keepsake from the 1850s? Technology has changed but our desire to hold on to our lost loved ones remains as strong as ever.
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. practice research student in photography, death, and artificial intelligence, and a podcast producer, journalist, author, artist, and filmmaker.
The Death of Photography in the Digital Afterlife