When Lee Geon-hui was looking for a gift for his father, he decided to give voice to a man he had never known: his grandfather, who died in a car accident before he was born.
Lee handed over some photographs and voice recordings to Vaice, a Seoul-based tech company, and wrote the text his grandfather was to speak. In the video, his digital reconstruction calls his son "my most precious treasure" and asks his forgiveness for forcing him to work in the fields as a child and for opposing his decision to become a hairdresser.
Lee's father had said he would not watch the clip. In the end he did, and broke down in tears. Lee told the Associated Press that he had put into his grandfather's mouth what he himself would have wanted to say to his father. The video was, in other words, a message between the living, entrusted to the reconstruction of someone dead.
Vaice claims to produce videos for around three hundred customers a month. Many are in their forties and fifties and want to see their deceased parents again; others commission a reconstruction of their grandparents to give as a gift to their own parents. A few photographs, short voice samples, and a script written by the family are all it takes to create a clip. The basic version runs three to five minutes and costs 600,000 won, roughly 390 dollars.
The videos are shown during holidays and ceremonies dedicated to ancestors. Nearly all of them include an "I love you." Some settle, at least on paper, old family conflicts: the dead person apologizes, endorses a choice they had opposed, or reassures children who are now grown.
In South Korea, the appetite for digital reconstructions has been fed in part by television appearances featuring deceased singers and actors. Meanwhile, some companies are experimenting with griefbots — systems that would allow people to hold conversations with a simulation of the deceased. Psychologists and legal experts worry that these technologies may make it harder to come to terms with a death, and are calling for rules on the commercial use of the voice and likeness of those who can no longer give their consent.
For now, though, many customers watch the video only once. Rather than going on talking to the dead, they use it to make the dead say what the living needed to hear.
