Ghost in the Machine… By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

April 18, 2012 Whitney Farmer 7 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and has to get up early tomorrow.

The music festival in the desert, Coachella, delivered another strange miracle last weekend.  Rapper Tupac Shakur performed three songs onstage with Snoop Dog – “Come with Me”, “Hail Mary”, and “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” – after greeting the delirious crowd with, “What up, Coachella…” He did this despite being shot dead in 1996.

The spectacle was a man-made event, a hybrid pseudo-hologram, courtesy of Digital Domain Media Group whose stock closed up 16.5% today. The two-dimensional image, rather than the 3-D of a true hologram, was a modified Pepper’s Ghost effect in which an image was projected off of a type of transparent and reflective screen. Interesting FX, but common for over a hundred years. The real work and innovation was dedicated to the CGI of Tupac. Rather than archival footage, Digital Domain created new images that were inspired by the original flesh and blood subject. It is artistic generations away from animation painted on film as in ‘Mary Poppins’ or ‘The Incredible Mr. Limpet’. It was artistic re-animation, an entirely different beast.

When Natalie Cole featured her father Nat King Cole in a video duet of “Unforgettable”, it felt okay because it was her dad. When Chanel featured Marilyn Monroe in its Chanel No. 5 ad, it seemed less comfortable as it opened a door to a new world of intellectual property entanglements. Who got paid for the use of her sweet celebrity, or had the dead become public domain? The Elvis estate possibly led the way by example by both fiercely controlling but also lucratively granting licenses of the image of the King. Someone who is famous is probably hoping to be able to provide for their posterity, even having their celebrity continuing to create wealth for their families after their death. Now they would be wise to also incorporate postmortem creation into their starmaking planning.

Rap and hip-hop have a tradition of borrowing from the past and reimagining for new purpose in the form of sampling. The lowrider car culture – originally a movement within the African American community in Southern California – provided a means of artistic pride of ownership for an economic demographic that was less likely to own homes. This occurs in countries that experience a real estate bubble, like Japan in the 1990s. Harold Brown of the band WAR of “Lowrider” song fame, told me once that in Long Beach, they were the first to do Extreme Makeover projects, but with cars rather than houses. Tupac’s performance was extreme sampling.

As long as the original get the credit and the cash, exploiting images across multiple media platforms can provide increasingly intriguing events such as what occurred during the closing weekend of Coachella. As of now, there are reportedly negotiations between Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, and representatives of the estate of Tupac Shakur regarding taking the smoke-and-mirrors show on tour.

Is there a limit? Who decides it? Is a re-animation for a concert or a film or a commercial different than listening to the voice of the dead who once were on vinyl and now are ipod-ed, or the soundtrack for a perfume-selling montage?

Recently at the club, we had a performance from an artist featured in Ice-T’s Sundance debuted film, “Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap”. Like everyone these days, more of his time had to be spent on selling himself rather than making new music.

Something doesn’t feel right here. Even if a loving family agrees, is it a good thing that the image of an artist gets used to deliver the creations of another? Is this an extreme extension of the lament that an artist is only successful after death as bidding wars begin on catalogs that have suddenly become finite?  Is it no big deal, like how quality copies of famous works are enjoyed on display in museums while the originals are seven floors below ground level in hermetically sealed environments?

Not sure where this will lead. This technology is surely going to be abused and will undoubtedly cross-pollinate with the creative juices behind crime novels and conspiracy theories. But personally, the owner at the club will probably be saying ‘yes’ to the guy who asked us to broadcast holograms of famous concerts two years ago…if he will return our calls now.

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Quote of the Blog, from Thomas Gray: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air”. Also quoted in Bull Durham by Susan Sarandon as ‘Annie’. Play Ball.

Photo courtesy of MTV.com.