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. Molly Hales argues that the confluence of digital technology and death reveals a process of ongoing mutual animation between the living and the dead. Lyrical and moving, Vital Ties offers a powerful rethinking of death, memory, and mediation in the digital age.