TeleAbsence: A Vision of Past and Afterlife Telepresence

Abstract

This paper presents our vision of TeleAbsence, extending the concept of telepresence to the past and the afterlife to address the vast emotional and temporal distance caused by the memory of loved ones who drifted apart and faded away. Instead of explicit and literal representations of loved ones, TeleAbsence describes poetic encounters with digital and physical traces left by the absence of others. TeleAbsence fosters illusory communications to conjure the feeling of being there with those no longer with us without using synthetic or generative representations and utterances. Our vision is deeply inspired by the Portuguese concept “Saudade”—the “desire for the beloved thing, people, place, and moment, made painful by its absence.” We present our vision through five design principles: presence of absence, illusory communication, the materiality of memory, traces of reflection, and remote time, grounded in historical and cultural contexts. We present exploratory narratives to illustrate these principles and the concept of ambient co-presence using poetry, phone, piano, and pen as mediums. We discuss challenges and opportunities for future work, including representational strategies to depict lost loved ones, ethical issues, and the possible extension of TeleAbsence to historical public figures.