Vital Ties

Vital Ties depicts an emergent form of intimacy with the dead mediated by digital technologies. In southern Australia, a game developer crafts a virtual reality experience, reuniting his best friend with an avatar of his late father. In northern California, a woman creates a smartphone app to log moments in which her deceased mother appears. In Chicago, a high school teacher visits her late brother’s Facebook page, hypnotized by the shifting content that animates and re-animates him. As digital media offer ways to bring the dead to presence, the living and the dead are haunted in new ways, affecting relationships to both media and death.

Author Biography

Molly Hales is a Medical Anthropologist and Physician at the University of Chicago. Her work centers on media, relationality, and medicine.