ghosts – Anna Huff

The Homesick Hotline Process and Launch

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Step one: Finding a hotline system

After a lot of research, we settled on Twilio Studios because we wanted a pay by minute plan for our low call volume and for the flexibility of the system. With widgets, we did not have to code ourselves which was convenient but later on screwed us over. The Widgets had bugs that I ended up getting around through very time-consuming, tedious trial and error, and staring over a few times. And emailing customer support a lot.

I briefly tried out Telzio but was suspended when they found out I was a student.

Recording Interviews

We were lucky enough to have a very diverse class so we had access to so many perspectives, cultures, and a decent range of ages. Some interviews we scheduled but about half of the 16 interviews were faculty or students that happened to be in the building and agreed to participate on the spot.

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We had our basic set of questions to slowly work our way to more personal questions but we were very flexible to accommodate to how the flow of conversation was going. We learned a lot of interviewing skills and how to properly record audio.

List of interview questions:

Who are the members of your family?

What is your family dynamic like?

What are the things your family expects from you?

How does your family show and receive love?

Are there special ways your family shows love to each other? Is there a specific story you can tell?

What do you cherish the most about your family?

When was the first time your family disappointed you?

What does home mean to you?

What do you need to make your own home?

What does homesickness feel like?

When are the times you feel the most homesick?

When is the last time you called home?

If you could talk to any family member right now who would it be?

What would you say to them that you feel like they need to know but havent said out loud?

We did our best to structure a quite, private space and provided tea and snacks and let the interviewees talk as long as they wanted. We found it did not take much prodding for people to talk about the people they care about. Some people talked for 15min and some were over an hour regardless if they were our friends or an acquaintance.

Transcribing

After we had reached our goal of 16 interviews we took the audio and transcribed the over 8 hours of audio. We needed to cross reference all the interviews to organize their answers into topics for the hotline, and we also wanted full transcriptions of the interviews for our homesick hotline directory. Kathy typed it out by hand where I listened to the audio and dictated it in Word.

Editing Audio

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We highlighted the transcriptions of what we wanted audio clips of and I set to work hunting them down and splicing together different interviews to make 2-3min segments for the hotline. In total, there are 27 segments with a correlating number that can be dialed on the hotline to listen to it. When a two digit number in dialed in the hotline, participants will hear 2-4 different people’s answer or opinion on a particular subject. I also recorded myself speaking instructions for the introduction and voicemail instead of using the bot.

Configuring the Hotline

Twilio is not user-friendly and is extremely tedious to do any task. After five days of doing nothing but work on twilio studio bugs I finally got it running. We were not really using the hotline flows for what they were built for and the system started to get finicky and over loaded. I’m glad twilio didn’t suspend my account over what I had been emailing them! Screen Shot 2018-12-16 at 7.08.01 PM

Homesick Hotline Directory

We wanted a physical object that could be a compliment to our hotline and become an archive for it once the hotline ever becomes disabled. The directory provides instructions for how to use the system, includes the numbers callers can dial with brief descriptions, and full transcriptions of the interviews. The interviews were anonymous so Kathy drew illustrations of the people we interviewed without including their face, and represented who they were in the number of miles away from home they were from where we conducted the interviews.

We also want to sell the directories to help fund the hotline to stay activate for as long as possible.

The Hotline Number

The Homesick Hotline number 410-927-1738 can now be officially called on any phone, anywhere in the U.S. We encourage callers to leave us a voicemail so we can then use their responses and include those audio recordings into the hotline as well.

This platform is very exciting for its mobility, sincerity, and how easy it is to exist outside the gallery space. The idea of call-in listening libraries has almost limitless possibilities and we have been really happy about the feedback from this project. Listening to strangers “talk to you” on the phone is an intimate experience and for many very emotional. This hotline is the heart of our community and now others have the opportunity to experience this simulated version on their own.

Peppers_Ghost-1

A hologram is a photographic capture of a light field using a laser and when lit properly will create a three-dimensional image. The first holograph was invented in 1962 by Yuri Denisyuk in the Soviet Union and by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan. Often confused as a hologram, the Pepper’s Ghost trick is 2D projection reflected through glass. Even though it is not a hologram, I would categorize it as holographic imagery because the intended purpose is to recreate (or imitate) a projected 3D object to be interacted with. It is no surprise Pepper’s Ghost caught on in theatres since the stage is the original platform for manifesting fantasy. Unlike story-telling, theatre adds physical vehicles to guide the imagination and as stage tricks became more sophisticated, the more real the illusions became. What is special about live theatre is that it is taking place in real time and is grounded in that “truth” even if the story is fantasy unlike movies and television which are records of past happenings. “Movie magic” is accepted as common place or easy with film editing but a live performance is respected to be much more difficult. Cultural applications of holographic imagery are made for first hand

Hologram figure of virtual British group Gorillaz appears on stage during their performance at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2005 in Lisbon

interaction. For example, famous singers are resurrected from the dead to perform on stage and politicians can perform live rallies at multiple locations all over a country at once. The famous example is Tupac at Coachella where a life-like animation of the deceased rapper sang and danced with the real Snoop Dog using the Pepper’s Ghost trick. Other musicians and actors have been “raised from the dead” and some bands only perform live as projections like the Gorillaz. Holograms and projection tricks are meant to be seen in person and do not photograph well. They are always experienced live.

The latest development of hologram technology is sense of touch. Japanese researchers from University of Tokyo’s Department of Complexity Science and Engineering (DCSE) have invented the Haptoclone. The Haptoclone can make a hologram of an object, like a ball, and when that holographic ball is tapped, the real ball resting a foot away will roll off its platform. The sensation is very light and feels like a slight brush because the ultrasound waves responsible for the sense of touch must be used at a low power or else the radiation levels will become dangerous. So technically a virtual handshake, or a hug would cost you your life.

Starting from the popularity of the pepper ghost trick, the illusionary phenomena has been used to “resurrect the dead”. The transparent quality makes sense to use the mirage-like images for spirits but even now there is a company in South Florida that manufactures Pepper’s Ghost trick set ups to make a “hologram eulogies” so people can attend their own funerals (Link http://aimholographics.com/ ). What is it about these optical illusions that are used to fantasize about death and the afterlife? Is it that they appear to exist between reality and imagination? Or does it feel like a doppelganger has been created that will live on once you die?

220px-The_Invention_of_Morel_1940_Dust_Jacket The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Casares is a science fiction novel from the 1940s about a device that makes a holographic recording of an entire island for a one week span. When the main character is cast away on the island he is the first to witness the holographic video and believing that it was displaying real people, falls in love with one of the recorded women. The catch of the holographic invention is once you are recorded, you will only exist in the recording and will no longer exist in the real world. The goal of immortality was achieved by the inventor but the immortality is only realized through the perception of others watching the recording. I love seeing echoes of the age-old fears of mirrors, photographs, and even paintings having the ability to steal people’s souls by capturing a person’s likeness. Casares layers more metaphor and depth to his story but the sentiment is still there. The superstitious attitude has now turned to intentional obsession because now we want our “souls to be stolen” by images. There are so many fantasies of “immortality” from Black Mirror’s uploading consciousness to the cloud to Futurist inventions of cryonics and Bina 48.

Tag: ghosts

410-927-1738