Melancholic media: virtual reality, traumatic loss, and magic

Abstract

This essay concerns itself with the status of ‘melancholic media’, or digital objects in psychic life after trauma on the grounds of three very different cases: Replika (a chatbot with avatar), Deep Nostalgia (the reanimating of family photographs), and Not the Only One (a noncommercial virtual agent). If for Freud, trauma is more than mind can endure; these surrogates both suggest concretization that which is being endured. Instead of directly confronting trauma and its overwhelm, these users might omnipotently reproduce a literal figure of their loss. Rather than examining these human and non-human interactions via the lens of the uncanny, I will return to the status of objects as melancholic media to think about psychic states in relationship to trauma and its multi-temporal aftermath. I trouble what these digital partial revivifications might do to and for psyches.