Thread by @amplify285

Struck just now by this "Deep Nostalgia" tech, which algorithmically animates photos. My colleague @Afromanticist has used it with this photo of #FrederickDouglass. It is amazing. And also terrifying. My first book was about haunting as praxis in Black lifeworlds, so thoughts +

My book is about memory & loss in AfAm life, and it ends with a consideration of Beloved coupled w/ James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead (work that structured my pivot into #BlackDH). I'm also thinking now about @toniasutherland's writing on postmortem holograms of Tupac +

In this case Deep Nostalgia works by mapping an image onto a set of templated movements. The image is algorithmically re-mastered (*shuddersincontext*) around those movements, like any computer-generated animation. Of course much of the terror is generated by the fact that +

the image is a photograph, so we insert here all the things we know about photographs, truth claims, & where we imagine the line between "reality" and— everything else "real." As a technique analog animation asks us to process gaps between material reality and what we imagine +

In my .break .dance interactive essay, I use examples of different kinds of animation to think about the gap between what we know and what we thus imagine we see. Evidence is itself algorithmic. I use this flipbook animation to make the point +

.break .dance: "...the brain fills the gaps by inserting continuity, a kind of speculation based on reasonable projections regarding an object’s movement across space. It is the work of technology to keep the duration of the gaps below the minimum threshold of perceptibility." +

The Deep Nostalgia tech that @Afromanticist is highlighting forces us to think hard about where we mark/ identify those thresholds. It reminds us that we cannot trust what we see, even as we live as people who must know things™ in order to live. +

19th c. spirit photography btw, emerged out of the belief that new photographic techs could force the threshold of perceptibility across dimensions— we could see ghosts— which is less maybe about representation than about technology as an aid to discovery, to what we don't see +

Deep Nostalgia tech is supposed to help us newly rediscover people fr our past by literally and figuratively reanimating them. (Again @toniasutherland's hologram work amplifies the stakes of profiting fr Black peoples deaths by producing robotic facsimiles of the Black living) +

But in a different vein, Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee wholly embraced the sense that photos could express a sense of how Black people often also live in active relationship with the dead, a sophisticated boundary-language for lossed ones as presence +

But the deep nostalgia tech that @Afromanticist's tweets about feels like a whole 'nother thing yet again. The image renders are especially striking in how they use actual photographs to try to get around the uncanny valley problem +

Oversimply, "uncanny valley" is the discomfort you feel when a digital render looks enough human to look human, but is also just enough off to signal that it is anything but, which we thus process and feel as terror (yes I've written on racial passing, the uncanny & virtuality) +

My guess is that the uncanniness is supposed to be short-circuited by the emotional experience of deep nostalgia itself. We are going to see what we so desperately might long to see, our absorption into the simulation that I guess we are to experience as a repetition of memory +

...rather than as something entirely new. A deep nostalgia photo is always new both bc it is a machine-generated simulation & also bc of its situation in the present moment of apprehension. It becomes real— successful— when someone says yes that is her. More memory than history +

So we arrive therefore at two problems. (Ok, that is a lie. There are like 50 jillion problems with this whole thing. I just mean right now as I'm thinking.)

But let's talk about two probs that are easily identified: From what I can tell, the movements onto which the photo is mapped are drawn from a database of possible movements. What does this mean for how our personhood is itself cultural? One reason I'm struggling to write now +

... is that I can't stop looking the image. Like, can't lie— I love this hot sauce Frederick Douglass (Am I allowed to say that? Am I heading some kind of Black Studies hell?)

At the same time, I am struck by, yes, the sauciness. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there's something deeply strange in watching a 19th c. figure "moving for the camera" in a distinctly modern way. The #DouglassSelfie will haunt our dreams. Hashtag Black History month +

But, more importantly, I'm thinking as usual about Toni Morrison, & the warning around which she structures the ending of Beloved. In my book, I focus on her use of the photograph that no one should look at for too long, lest “something more familiar than the dear face” appear +

Like how do we choose to have technologies like "Deep Nostalgia" in our lives? How do digital humanities perspectives, namely #BlackDH, help us think alongside such technologies? Let me close with an image that I end my book with, and that I still think about all the time +

It's Van Der Zee's "Future Expectations," wherein he channels spirit photography and Black dimensionality & its thresholds, but uses it to pivot us toward imagining beautiful futures for ourselves. For so many Black people, the proper place of nostalgia is situated in the future.

Thank you @Afromanticist for this gift of things to think about on a Sunday morning. (Also L O L at how I spend a lot of time kvetching about how no one seems to understand that digital and live events should also be cited, but here I am with a twitter essay. #CiteBlackWomen)

Also, someone asked me for the book title, it's called Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture (2008). Of course I want you to read it; it informs almost all of my #BlackDH work, but it's also currently being converted into a twitter bot 👀