R.IP.
Vince Lombardi: “It’s not whether we get knocked down but whether we get back up.”
Just a few days prior, ESPN released a new documentary in their 30 for 30 series, Al Davis vs. the NFL. In what I assume is connected to the Lombardi gimmick, the film used deepfake technology to reanimate former Raiders owner Al Davis and former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. Both men are dead, but by masking old footage of them onto actors’ faces, the post-production team brought them awkwardly back to life. Director Ken Rodgers described deepfakes as “technology that can put the face of historical people onto stand-ins.” Historical people is as funny a term for dead people as stand-ins is for live ones, but he’s got the gist of it: hardly restricted to making smooth-faced zombies out of dead football legends, deepfakes have all sorts of applications, from misinformation to corporate training videos. The word itself, a portmanteau of deep learning and fake, originated in pornography, where faces of celebrities are digitally grafted onto porn stars.
Al Davis: “I can control most things, but I don't seem to be able to control death.”
Disney, which owns ESPN, has famously used CGI in Star Wars spin-offs to include beloved characters despite the death or aging of actors. As Disney has amassed an enormous collection of popular IP, mostly through big acquisitions—Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm—it makes sense that they wouldn’t let the limits of human lifespans interfere with their ambitious programming: at Disney’s Investor Day last December, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy announced ten upcoming Star Wars spinoffs for Disney+. Two of the Mandalorian spinoffs, she said, will “culminate in a climactic story event,” which is a helpful way to think about much of this big-IP content: the climax has less to do with the plot of a single story than it does with the meta-narrative of well-known properties finally sharing the screen. What’s going to happen next? is now Who’s it gonna be? It is, after all, not a story but a “story event.”
Ken Rodgers: “We […] began to pursue digital technology to re-create the visual essences […], as if their spirits were still with us.”
Even though much deepfaking and CGI wonder-working isn’t technically holography, hologram has become a catch-all for digital simulations of absent persons. As Keith L. Richards’ Design Engineer’s Sourcebook explains, it “enables a light field, which is generally the product of a light source scattered off objects to be recorded and later reconstructed […] somewhat similar to sound recording, whereby a sound field […] is encoded in such a way that it can be reproduced later.”
Tim Ellis: “You’re going to see him and it’s going to sound just like him.”
Less than a week after the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift released a re-recorded version of her 2008 hit “Love Story,” the result of a battle to regain the rights to her master recordings (Scooter Braun bought the record label that owned her masters, then sold the recordings to an investment fund for over $300 million). “Taylor’s Version,” as it’s called, is only imperceptibly different, which is the point. Somewhere between a reboot and a reclamation, it is, at any rate, good for business—”Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” is currently number one on the country charts.
Kathleen Kennedy: “It’s not a reboot. It’s a continuation.”
In 2018, when it leaked that Justin Timberlake planned to jam with a hologram of Prince at the Super Bowl LII halftime show, a 1998 interview resurfaced on Twitter. Prince, whose halftime show at Super Bowl XLI is widely considered the best ever, had said that “If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing... it really is demonic. And I am not a demon.” In the same interview, Prince spoke against record labels owning his masters: “you become a slave to them in the sense that they own the rights to the master recordings of your music for all time, and you're merely an employee.” Sheila E., Prince’s drummer and music director in the 80s, talked Timberlake out of a hologram, but he still projected a video of Prince behind him while he covered “I Would Die 4 U.”1
Taylor Swift: “And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”
Last week, the Beach Boys announced that they had sold a controlling interest in their music catalog to Iconic Artists Group for some $100 million, though the terms of the deal were not made public. A couple months before, Bob Dylan sold his music catalog to Universal Music Publishing for over $300 million. The Universal Music Group CEO crowed that “decades, even centuries from now, the words and music of Bob Dylan will continue to be sung and played—and cherished—everywhere.” In a recent Pitchfork piece, the head of another investment group explained the focus on established artists: “Why would you spend your time trying to create something new at the expense of your catalog, when your catalog is already filled with songs that people know and love and have demand for?”
Prince: “I realize I'm part of a musical history and I revere the legacy of my predecessors.”
Copyright law in the US has long been avaricious and stifling, but the “historical person” deepfake seems to open up new and stranger possibilities of financialization. Everyone knows that influence is big business; success can be measured in impressions, likes, and followers. But what about legacy, influence’s loftier cousin? We tend to think, perhaps naïvely, of legacy as an amorphous, almost spiritual thing: past deeds to wrestle with, praise, or atone for; bodies of work to encounter and respond to. How jarring, then, to think of legacy as a death mask worn over the erased expressions of the living.
Vince Lombardi: “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.”
ben tapeworm