Memento Mori
-Dulce et Decorum Est- Wilfred Owen, 1918
You’ve seen the images.
The processed Hollywood faces gone back or forward seamlessly, in time.
Once young, attractive, beautiful and sought after, age creeps up slowly if a portrait is still, as in a movie poster or short, as in a brief trailer.
They are remembered in their most famous roles as if actor and character were the same: some cannot escape the identity conferred theatrically, if the role becomes widespread and singularly identified with face or figure.
Those who escape fame are better known in the instant, for who they are.
Once past the Hollywood limit, they revert to normal mortals, not frozen in an instant on screen, known for who they are by friends and family but perhaps unrecognizable from the changes brought on by years.
Those with real talent, continue working and may reach a state of veneration for longevity beyond the instant attraction of their younger selves.
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Among the most intriguing applications of images processed with artificial intelligence, are re-animations of human mummies extrapolated by anatomists, artists and geneticists to their vital appearance before death.
This was once a sideshow attraction, then portrayed as history and archeology, to expose the leathern faces and tight lips to an awed public willing to pay for such visualizations. The latest development is to see how well they might blend into a modern crowd on any American street. At least one commercial for insurance humorously features a cave man as merely one of the crowd of us.
Part of the same are the religious relics such as the skull of St. Valentine, Patron Saint of Lovers, Beekeepers, Plaque and Epilepsy, on display at the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome (AD 290).
Acceptably preserved mummies are rare: the practice of embalming reached a high art form in Egypt (3500 BCE) for those who could, by wealth and station, afford it. These predate the writing of the Old Testament (~1600 BCE).
Others preserved in aridity of the high desert of the Tarim tribe in China (2,000-320 BCE), offer another example of astonishing ability of AI to falsely convince the viewer of reanimation of ancient, withered flesh, adding the convincing gasp for breath as if the mummy were actually a living being resuscitated in fact.
The Swiss Ice Man known as Ötzi discovered in 1991 in the Alpine Schnastal glacier, dates from 3500 BCE, and was recovered with his clothing, accessories and the contents of his last meal intact. Given the man and his stuff, it remains conjectural what he was thinking in his last days and in the moments before his death. Neuroscientists suggest that for up to seven minutes after clinical death, the human brains replays the memorable and pleasurable scenes of the just-passed life.
Were it not for morbid curiosity, none of these re-animations would be any more acceptable than 1950s-era horror scenarios of the walking dead.
Likewise, this is the focus of legitimate human paleontology where morphological and osteological analysis, in conjunction with discovery site and burial tradition, often reveals subtle clues about the culture and tribal structure of those from whom the remains are derived.
It is satisfying for a famous character direct out of history and literature, to be found under a parking lot, for example English King Richard III (1452-1485). In fact, not King Richard, but his last mortal remains.
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Indeed, what do these digital manipulations for entertainment, and museum exhibits for scholarly edification, reveal about our own identity, and our own lives? As a publc display, they have achieved a species of immortality beyond the span of their years, that will elude us as writers.
What part of our own mortality will live on, if any, and to what purpose?