Revenants: On the animation of dead people’s portraits in contemporary technoculture

The most recent image-making techniques have made it possible to generate photorealistic portraits of deceased individuals that can be digitally animated so that the dead may remain somehow connected to the living. A popular tactic appears to be collecting all existing data of the person (pictures, video, audio) and using machine-learning algorithms to construct a digital simulacrum endowed with a virtual “self” which can live on forever. This avatar can be subsequently used within virtual immersive environments where the medium seems to vanish and the traditional separation of the real world from the image world is blurred in such a way that the user can even interact with the “revenant.” This essay analyses how the new virtual iconoscape dramatically undermines the common notion of the portrait as a “representation” of the individual’s traits.