Live Projections of Deceased Artists:

Worship, Representation, and Immortality

Abstract

This article investigates the imaginary borders of life and death present in the music entertainment industry from a selection of 3 shows based on 2D and 3D natural scale projections of deceased singers: Tupac Shakur (2012), Cazuza (2013), Michael Jackson (2014). A new way of dealing with the symbolic capital of dead artists leads us to consider the images as symbolic representations. The projections, according to Hofer (2011), are manifested as metalepsis that calls into question the effect of presence without the presence of the fact artist, following the trend of using screens on stages. Debray (1993) says that the relation of the image with the death comes from cults to the ancestors, in an attempt of their survival, by the image. In this way, we understand that within the presentation “hologram” format, there is a significant indicator of the transformations in the way the dead are represented.