On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a hologram of Subhas Chandra Bose to mark the 125th anniversary of the latter’s birth, at the spot where a statue of Bose is set to appear, in Rajpath. It looks as if the hologram happened because Modi woke up late to the publicity value of the memory and wanted to be in Netaji’s frame anyway, even though the statue wasn’t ready, so the PR team thought of this flashy alternative. Which is not a good idea.
What is the purpose of the holographic object here? Is it a technology show? Doubtful: There is no innovation here so much as a general synthesis of an elaborate piece of technology. And if there was no purpose other than to allow the Prime Minister to use the occasion as a channel to highlight himself, it would be humiliating for Bose, surely.
Nor is it that the Bose statue is not actually in Delhi (in a convenient location either) – although a section of the media has attempted to falsely suggest that this would be the first time that Netaji has been honored with it. The likeness of the national capital.
according to News 18, the Bose hologram will include at least one 4K projector – costing “above 15 lakh a unit” – and a 3D screen to create a Bose salute. India has had a fraught relationship with technology, perhaps more than that of science. Hardware running problems in India go hand in hand with the other side of the obsession with frugal engineering.
The end effect is a general lack of awareness of the processes by which tools and machines are ensured to function as intended. The elevators and tube lights at many train stations are often out of order. Street lights and traffic lights need frequent repairs. The public transport infrastructure is constantly skewed towards ruin. Pass any interstate toll gate and you will likely notice the RF tag reader not working. Computers in many local government offices are either down or barely connected to the Internet. Even Aadhaar’s biometric scanners posed multiple problems when the software was first introduced.
Against this backdrop of near-persistent glitches in situations where they really matter to people, the Bose anthropomorphic statue appears as much as a symbol of Indian nationalism as a reminder of the “high” level, spending, where – funded technology will work as expected. Specifically, it enhances the impression of the nature of the bathtub functional Technology in India: reserved for very low level/scale, such as light bulbs, rickshaws and gas stoves, and very high level/scale, such as smartphones, rockets and trailers, with a large gap in between.
So much for basic technology; How about the same? The problem here is definitely one of the purpose of a hologram, especially as it is different from a 2D painting or image on the one hand and a statue on the other.
Holography is just “cool technology” in the same way that television is “cool technology” – that is, not at all – and it has also raised questions about the inappropriate ways in which it can be used. Two particularly controversial examples come to mind.
In 2012, at the popular Coachella music festival in California, organizers created a 3D spectral shape of rapper Tupac Shakur on stage, using a combination of a projector, a reflective screen, and a semi-transparent screen, to make him scream. to an audience of one hundred thousand people and sang two songs. Tupac was murdered in 1996.
Four years later for the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars StoryIndustrial Light & Magic used CGI to animate actors Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher as Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia Organa, respectively. But Cushing died in 1994; And the on-screen Leia Organa Fisher was young, as in the beginning star Wars A movie, effectively – a different person – and in a way that speaks volumes no longer exists. All of these cases have been criticized for refusing to leave the dead in peace, among other things.
(CGI is different from holography but in this context it is easily comparable.)
Resurrection is a troubling idea, in part because it is a cause and effect of the cultural significance of death. At the same time, as Thomas Konner argued in a recent doctoral thesis at the University of California, San Diego, holograms also offer new ways to experience technology-mediated revival. a personality. Neither Cushing nor Fisher may have portrayed such characters, but Tupac certainly did—as did Bose.
The media folks at Tupac’s “hologram” were well aware that techniques rather than supernatural magic were delivering what they saw and heard, even if they knew few details. These whole themes… I interpreted the presence of the dead rapper first by admiring the technical mediation but then by accepting that the same process of mediation… manifests itself clearly as both living and dead. The concert became corporate – just another encounter with the archival dead. … [T]Tupac’s “holograms” function not as a ghost, or as a man, or as a purely technical object but as a new incarnation of a preexisting frontier entity, historically located and intermediate: the performer’s personality… “Holograms” allow these particular spaces of performance to be further mediated in ways that reopen them to a comeback, if The performers themselves were not, at least from the new elements and echoes of their characters.
Given these new and diverse advantages of holography, it is worth asking why the Indian government installed a file Still Bose on Rajpath Picture – A picture that will do nothing but wow onlookers by being a 3D character. Imagine, by contrast, being able to see the guy walking from side to side, making a pure salute or even moving his lips to a synchronized recording. But then, Bose’s words – and the actual character – awkwardly align with the policies of India’s rulers today, so it’s best to leave him silent, they must have made sense.
However, if we’re not going to take advantage of the additional possibilities that holograms give us, why spend so much taxpayer money on them when in fact a big picture of Bose mounted on a rotating pedestal would? Tacky is definitely better than extravagance; But if you disagree, we can still consider a 3D printed version made of plastic, for example.
Ultimately, a Bose hologram is neither a technical show nor functionally sensible, it is little more than a glow-in-the-dark stand for an upcoming statue. And unlike the Netaji statue in the Red Fort’s Subhash Park, ordinary Indians may not be able to interact with the hologram either, considering that it will be erected on a pedestal in one of the most controlled areas of the country.
As such, it would be the perfect symbol of remoteness and inaccessibility to high tech – and power – for the vast majority.
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