In 2010, a man named Itaru Sasaki created a Wind Phone. The phone, a rotary phone disconnected from any network, was inside a glass phone booth in Sasaki’s garden.
He used the phone to help communicate his thoughts and emotions to his cousin, who had recently passed away. The phone was a connection between life and death, his words were carried away “on the wind.”
A year later, after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Sasaki opened the phone to the public.
Thousands of people came to speak into the phone, telling loved ones the messages they never were able to during their life.
Ideas like the Wind Phone have helped re-imagine death in the modern day, the concept for this year’s Calgary Institute for the Humanities Community Seminar at the University of Calgary.
The 44th seminar took place from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Confluence Historic Site and Parkland on May 9.
The forum included guest speakers ranging from college professors to artists and musicians.
Jim Ellis, the director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and a professor of English, said that the topic for each forum is chosen one year in advance, based on what the institute believes will be of interest for Calgarians.
This year’s re-imagining of death topic was inspired directly by the story of the Wind Phone. A version of the phone was recently constructed in Calgary at the Union Cemetery.
Ellis said that the seminar offers people new ways of thinking about changes in culture.
“It’s a chance for people to hear from different thinkers’ and speakers’ different perspectives on the contemporary experience of death,” he said.
“It’s also a chance for them to participate in the conversation, that’s why we call it a community seminar, because not only do they hear the talks, but the speakers ask questions to them.”
Safe spaces to discuss becoming more important then ever
These days, it’s as important as ever to get together and have civil discussions and disagreements, according to Ellis.
The forum tried to get speakers from traditional humanities disciplines like literature, art, music, philosophy, and religion, Ellis said.
“We’re always interested in having somebody from Alberta, but we’re also interested in having people from away. We do really strive to get a mix of perspectives, I think that that makes it so much more interesting,” he said.
Ellis said that with technological advancements through AI, the dead are more accessible than ever. This has added to the ethical challenges faced in the modern re-imagining of death.
He referenced a chatbot that sounds like a deceased grandmother or a group of fans watching holographic-Tupac perform on stage, as examples.
“Do we have a right to take a person’s digital remains and do what we want with them?” he said.
“Can we turn them into a chatbot? Can we make a hologram of them and make them perform for us? Do the dead have a right to be dead and left alone?”
Ellis said that these days, no one ever really dies.
Specialists raise questions for everyone else to answer, Ellis said. He said that it is important for different people to be able to discuss difficult spiritual questions together and hopes the forum is a method for that conversation.
“We have to explore the implications of those questions for ourselves, for our communities, for our loved ones, for our lives,” he said.
