The George Floyd Hologram: Between Memorial, Media, and Market

On the evenings of July 27 and 28, 2020, a larger-than-life hologram of George Floyd was projected at the monument sites of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia (USA). The hologram – a stylized portrait formed from a swarm of digitally created fireflies – shone brightly in front of the monuments, its focused light obscuring them from view. The name “George Floyd” and the slogan “Keep Fighting” hovered in graffiti-style lettering, seemingly suspended in the air before the statues. The nightly illuminations at Monument Avenue were part of “A Monumental Change: The George Floyd Hologram Memorial Project” – a collaboration between the global petition platform Change.org, the UK-based technology company Kaleida, and the Floyd family. A short video, posted on Change.org’s official YouTube channel in October 2020, visually documents the project.

The George Floyd Hologram Memorial Project was conceived as a touring installation, following a series of locations in the US South that mirrored the historical path of the 1961 Freedom Rides, evoking the civil rights movement in its wake. Starting with a private event for the Floyd family in Richmond, Virginia, and a public event on the day after, the hologram moved through Asheville, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, before its final stop in Birmingham, Alabama. In every instance, the hologram was projected at or close to a local confederate monument acting as a temporary counter-monument, hence the project’s title: “A Monumental Change.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protests erupted across the entire US and beyond, amplifying the Black Lives Matter movement’s momentum and visibility. Many of these protests included visual interventions, from painted murals to large-scale projections of images. Importantly, many of these were nighttime interventions, strategically timed in order to maximize visibility – just like the George Floyd Hologram Memorial Project. The project was realized within eight weeks, from Floyd’s murder in late May to its first presentation in late July, reflecting a sense of urgency of its messaging as much as the rapid execution of the digitally crafted memorial.

Following its showing, the George Floyd Hologram Memorial received extensive coverage by local and national news. Journalists referred to it as “a new light” and “symbol for change”. These expressions suggest that the night’s darkness not only made the display technically possible, but that the light installation was also interpreted as a metaphor of contrast. As scholar Sara Blair noted, interventions like the hologram projection “require nightfall and the cloak of darkness to be visible,” and by “[d]ramatizing illumination, they transpose the signification of blackness and of light.”¹Sara Blair, “Facing Our Pandemic,” in Being Human During Covid, ed. Kristin Ann Hass (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 56.

The first public event of the project generated a particularly wide resonance due to its proximity to the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee. First unveiled in May 1890, the statue historically represents – or rather represented, as it was dismantled in 2021 – a glorified Confederate memory. The bronze of Lee, seated on his favorite horse Traveller, shows him in a calm, contemplative pose, with his gaze directed forward, representing the archetype of the stoic and noble commander. Although equestrian monuments often visualize the horse in motion, like prancing or raising up, this monument shows Lee in total control of himself and the horse. The large pedestal below the bronze was adorned with inscriptions that reinforced the Confederate narrative. It also elevated the figure of Lee to a height of over 60 feet (18 meters), emphasizing his authority. The monument was surrounded by an elliptical roundabout, which was part of a broader urban design project, Monument Avenue, intended to commemorate Confederate leaders by creating a cityscape of monumental sculptures. It was also part of a land speculation, transforming farm land into a prestigious modern street, attracting white tourism and white middle to upper class residents of Richmond.²Cf. Sarah Beetham and Beth Harris, “Defeated, heroized, dismantled: Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Monument”, Smarthistory, September 10, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcGT-YeLVVE [last accessed April 10, 2025. Monument Avenue continues to be glorified in merchandise products, such as this vintage-looking metal sign with a reprint of a 1940s postcard motif, catering to conservative to right-leaning Southern heritage enthusiasts.

In the summer of 2020, protestors began covering the statue’s pedestal with graffiti, slowly but surely transforming the monument from a symbol of Confederate reverence into a site of civil resistance.³For a more in-depth look at and oral history of this particular site in Richmond, Virginia, see also Alex Criqui, “Reclaiming the Monument. Processes towards dismantling symbols of oppression in Richmond, Virginia,” in Visual Redress in Africa from Indigenous and New Materialist Perspectives, ed. Elmarie Costandius and Gera de Villiers (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), 200–213. Layers upon layers of painted slogans accumulated, marking a shift in the monument’s meaning. Before the George Floyd Hologram was installed in July, the site had already been temporarily reconfigured into a memorial for Floyd: in June, a black-and-white portrait of him had been      projected onto the statue at nighttime. The projection, depicted here, enveloped the monument, keeping the figure of Lee in the shadows as Floyd’s face illuminated its pedestal, now covered in the colorful graffiti. This reversal of the monument’s inherent logic was the deliberate strategy of local artists Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, who named their work “Reclaiming the Monument” and described their approach as “utilizing the peaceful and nondestructive medium of light.”⁴Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, “About Us,” Reclaiming the Monument,  https://www.reclaimingthemonument.com/copy-of-about-us [last accessed April 10, 2025.

In a recently published paper titled “Let the Light Shine: Reclaiming Public Space through Digital projection”, Katherine D. Lind referred to Klein and Criqui’s work as a “vernacular palimpsest,” a method of layering new meanings onto existing ones, recontextualizing the monument into a space for inclusive, community-centered engagement.⁵Katherine D. Lind, “Let the Light Shine: Reclaiming Public Space Through Digital Projection,” Howard Journal of Communications, March 12, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2024.2326218 [last accessed April 10th 2025. At first glance, photographs of the George Floyd Hologram, projected at the same site just a month later seem to continue this layering process. However, unlike Klein and Criqui’s projection, which directly illuminated the statue, the hologram did not use the monument itself as a screen. Instead, it was projected onto a separate, freestanding screen made of a gauze-like material containing silver to enhance its reflective properties. This special type of screen, that Kaleida calls “Holonet”, was positioned in front of the statue – as seen in a photograph by Steve Helber featured in Arianna Coghill’s article. Thus, the hologram’s interaction with the statue remained an optical staging rather than a direct inscription onto the monument.

These types of projections, marketed by companies like Kaleida as “holographic”, are in fact optical illusions based on a historical stage trick – ironically called “Pepper’s Ghost”. Unlike holography, which uses lasers and wavefront reconstruction to create a free-floating three-dimensional still image without the need for a lens or screen, these illusions rely on strategic lighting, reflective surfaces, and careful positioning. As a result, the viewing experience is highly dependent on perspective: from the right angle, the projection appears fully formed, but from others, it may be cut off or even distorted. This makes the George Floyd Hologram especially spectacular in professional photographs and videos, where controlled framing minimizes the visibility of the screen – producing an idealized, and in some ways unreal, representation of the technology. This can, for instance, be seen in a photograph by Eze Amos included in an NBC article about the unveiling of the hologram in Richmond. 

Scholars have referred to these projections as “faux holograms”⁶Sean F. Johnston, Holograms: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 203. and “not true holograms,”⁷Jacqueline Sheean, “A (new) specter haunts Europe: the political legibility of Spain’s hologram protests,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 19, no. 8 (2018): 468. emphasizing the distinction between Pepper’s Ghost illusions and laser-based holography. Yet rather than dismissing its unreal quality as mere deception, we might instead think with Kate O’Riordan’s concept of “unreal objects” – “things in the making,” inherently unfinished, and always inviting technological solutions.⁸Kate O’Riordan, Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 1. Through its photographic representation and digital circulation, the unreal object of the faux hologram takes on a different kind of reality – one that is enacted through the very act of calling it a hologram nonetheless, embedding it within media practices that unfold largely online and across platforms.

If we consider the hologram as another layer in the palimpsest of the Robert E. Lee monument, I would argue – building on Lind – that it no longer fully belongs to the vernacular. The shift from a grassroots, local artist-led intervention (Klein and Criqui’s projection) to an initiative backed by a global petition platform (Change.org) and a tech-company (Kaleida) suggests a move toward a commodified palimpsest. This transformation is not absolute but signals a shift in how the act of memorialization was framed and circulated. While the graffiti accumulated over time and remained physically present, and Klein and Criqui’s projection was ephemeral yet locally rooted, the hologram entered this layered site as a more polished, technologically mediated spectacle – and one that carried with it the branding of a corporate-backed social justice initiative. 

The shift aligns with the larger trajectory of Change.org’s involvement in Floyd’s memorialization. The petition “Justice for George Floyd,” created the day after Floyd’s murder, became one of the most signed petitions on the platform, with 19.6 million signatures to this day. It initially demanded the arrest and prosecution of the police officers involved, but its impact extended beyond raising awareness, as it spurred calls for legislative changes in policing and broader discussions on systemic racism. At the same time, however, Change.org faced criticism over the commodification of activism itself – particularly as the petition generated significant fundraising without clear transparency on how the money was allocated.⁹Aaron Holmes, “Change.org doesn’t donate the money raised through its record-breaking George Floyd petition — and some donors say they feel misled,” Business Insider, June 3, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/change-org-is-keeping-the-money-raised-through-its-record-breaking-george-floyd-petition-and-some-donors-say-they-feel-misled/articleshow/76185573.cms; Aaron Holmes, “59 former Change.org employees are calling on the company to donate the money it made from its record-breaking ‘Justice for George Floyd’ petition,” Business Insider, June 9, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/59-former-change-org-employees-are-calling-on-the-company-to-donate-the-money-it-made-from-its-record-breaking-justice-for-george-floyd-petition/articleshow/76292800.cms. In this sense, the hologram was not just a commemorative gesture but also a strategic act of branding, aligning the tech company and petition platform with racial justice discourse at a moment of high popularity.

The petition on Change.org is adorned with a widely circulated photograph of George Floyd wearing a black hoodie, standing in front of a red brick wall. This particular photograph has been appropriated in endless fashions, commemorating Floyd’s death and mobilizing his image as a victim of systemic racial violence. Its creative treatments range from various street art murals to TIME magazine’s May 2021 cover, created by artist Ange Hillz. Notably, many of the adaptations invoke religious iconography, portraying Floyd with a halo or angelic features – visual strategies that elevate his representation from an individual victim to a martyr-like figure, reinforcing his status as both a symbol of injustice and a site of collective mourning.

George Floyd has become “a racial icon,” whose representation, Nicole Fleetwood argues, functions as “a negotiation of the historical present.”¹⁰Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons. Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1. Fleetwood looks at photography as the key medium in the making and circulation of racial icons. To her, the icon is a particular image that makes people move and get together: “especially in the realm of social and political movements, [racial icons] make us want to do something.“¹¹Fleetwood, On Racial Icons, 4. Yet, as the widespread reappropriation of Floyd’s photograph demonstrates, the urge to do something with an image can be both powerful and fraught. This tension is evident in critiques of how Floyd’s photograph has been taken up in the design world. In a piece titled “Black Lives Matter is Not a Design Challenge”, designer Schessa Garbutt calls attention to the ethical stakes of visually engaging with Floyd’s portrait. While many appropriations are driven by good intentions, Garbutt argues that Floyd should not be treated as a mere “portrait exercise” for designers seeking to associate themselves with the movement. This ambivalence about racial iconicity itself is also mentioned by Fleetwood, as she asserts that the power of racial icons “hinges on the relationship between veneration and denigration” – suggesting that such images can be at once empowering and victimizing.¹²Fleetwood, On Racial Icons, 10.

In the summer of 2020, the George Floyd Hologram Memorial Project inserted itself into an already very visible circulation of Floyd’s image, further amplifying his transformation into a racial icon. In doing so, it also participated, at least in part, in the “design challenge” critiqued by Garbutt. But by choosing the format of the hologram, the project took the appropriation of Floyd’s image beyond two-dimensional still imagery, intensifying its representation into hyper-visuality and producing the illusion of three-dimensional presence in space. Unlike a photograph, the hologram does not simply capture or frame an image; it asserts itself into the physical environment, occupying space without quite becoming a body. Like the monument onto which it was projected, the hologram is larger than life – a ghostly, hovering head.

Furthermore, the George Floyd Hologram can be positioned within a larger trend of racial icons appearing as or via hologram. Most famously, rapper Tupac Shakur was digitally resurrected for Coachella 2012, followed by holographic performances of other Black cultural icons: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole – all posthumously revived to sell tickets for live events at which they perform(ed) beyond the grave. However, the George Floyd Hologram taps into a different practice. Unlike these entertainment-driven revivals, it was framed as a political and activist cause. This hologram is not, as Tonia Sutherland classifies performances like Tupac’s, a “Frankenstein-like mix of archival footage, a body double, motion capturing techniques, [and] CGI.”¹³Tonia Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body. Race and the Digital Afterlife (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 91. Instead, Floyd’s likeness was digitally created as an artwork inspired by his iconic photograph.

Yet, as Sutherland elaborates in her critique of digital resurrection practices, even when created with the approval of families – as was the case with Floyd, Tupac, and Whitney Houston – these holograms still raise ethical concerns: “[T]he dead are [here] conscripted to a performative version of life for the visual pleasure and satisfaction of others. […] With such carceral technologies, when the human body dies, what remains now includes new media onto which harmful myths of Blackness are projected.”¹⁴Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body, 98. Regardless of its activist framing, the Floyd hologram remains entangled in the same tensions Sutherland identifies: racial icons’ digital afterlives are inevitably “co-opted and commercialized,” serving “commercial interests, souvenir and fetish cultures, Othering, spectacle, and whiteness as higher powers.”¹⁵Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body, 98–99.

In addition to Sutherland’s critique of digitally resurrecting Black bodies for visual spectacle, the aesthetics of the George Floyd Hologram – its stylized animated portrait, glowing in the darkness of the night, and urging its viewers to “keep fighting” – also invite analysis through what Sianne Ngai calls “animatedness”. Part of her catalog of Ugly Feelings, Ngai describes animatedness as an exaggerated emotional expressiveness that is often projected onto racialized bodies, rendering them hyper-visible objects of public consumption while detaching them from agency.¹⁶Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 89–125. 

Though Floyd’s depiction in the hologram doesn’t display overt emotionality in the same way that Ngai’s primary example, the Claymation sitcom the PJs, does through exaggerated physical comedy, the hologram’s hovering and slowly dissolving light form nevertheless animates Floyd’s image to the point of abstraction. The glowing, ethereal, almost saint-like representation aligns with the creative treatments of Floyd’s portrait critiqued by Garbutt, where visual stylization risks aestheticizing or even depoliticizing his image. Additionally, the hologram’s street-art aesthetic pays tribute to Black cultural expression yet does so in its most familiar visual codes.

Furthermore, a certain uncanniness of digitally resurrected bodies and animated faces comes into play, as argued by Sutherland. She connects this eerie quality to Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley, but with a crucial racial dimension: “Narratives attached to the (digitally) resurrected ‘Black Body’ are also liminal and difficult to locate. If Mori’s uncanny valley applies here, it is in the resonances between the Black Body and the uncanny body, and it is ghosted by centuries-old practices of white supremacy.“¹⁷Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body, 89. 

In this sense, the George Floyd Hologram occupies a charged space: while intended to honor Floyd, it also risks reducing him to a ghostly image, locked in an unfamiliar time and space. The glowing projection, momentarily flickering into existence onto Southern monuments, evokes a kind of memento mori – a reminder of mortality and the violent histories inscribed on these sites. But rather than prompting introspection, the hologram’s ghostly presence, circulating through online photographs and videos, made it vulnerable to reinterpretations as something eerie or even horrifying. These readings, however, were never neutral; the image was quickly politicized, with some online actors seizing upon the hologram’s aesthetic to twist its meaning.

What struck me while researching the hologram’s online circulation were the ways in which right-wing accounts manipulated and reframed it. Take, for instance, a video shared in a tweet by the user @themodalice. A new sound layer had been added to a recording of the hologram: viewers now heard the chilling soundtrack of the 1992 horror movie Candyman, a film in which a student researching urban legends unwittingly summons the vengeful spirit of a murdered Black artist. In this altered context, the hologram was no longer a commemorative tribute but a figure of horror – Floyd transformed from a racial icon into a threatening presence. This reframing fed into racist narratives about Black men as criminals, ultimately dehumanizing Floyd and delegitimizing the memorial’s intent.

As the hologram tour progressed, media coverage dwindled, mirroring a broader waning of public attention. One of the few Alabama news reports indicated that, unlike the initial buzz in Virginia, the hologram’s final appearance in Birmingham did not draw a large crowd: “Don’t be surprised if you missed it, though. It happened on Saturday night, from 9 p.m. to 9:45 p.m., with no advance publicity. … It’s not even clear if anyone besides the crew saw it.”¹⁸Greg Garrison, “George Floyd hologram makes appearance in Birmingham,” August 3, 2020, AL.com – Alabama Media Group, https://www.al.com/news/2020/08/george-floyd-hologram-makes-appearance-in-birmingham.html [last accessed April 10th 2025]. According to the organizers, they deliberately chose not to publicize the event “to avoid any unpleasant or controversial scenes as have happened in other showings of the image.”¹⁹N.A., “George Floyd 3D Hologram Triggers Racist Woman … ‘Look at That N*****’,” TMZ, 31 July 2020, https://www.tmz.com/2020/07/31/george-floyd-3d-hologram-event-triggers-racist-woman-drop-n-word/. I cannot tell whether this would be enough of a concern to not announce the event in Birmingham, Alabama, or if there were other unmentioned reasons at play. There is at least one TMZ report documenting a confrontation in Richmond, Virginia, where a bystander spewed racist slurs at protesters gathered around the projection. Whether this incident or others like it influenced the decision remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that by the tour’s end, the hologram as a form of temporarily projected counter-monument, went from a site of active engagement and gathering in space to become “strictly symbolic.”²⁰Garrison, “George Floyd hologram makes appearance in Birmingham.”

The ephemerality of the George Floyd Hologram Project raises larger questions about what remains of it today except some clickable news headlines and the feeling of having done something good on the side of the companies. Looking at Kaleida’s website today shows a record of spectacular projects, but no trace of this initiative. The removal of the Robert E. Lee monument can be seen as both a victory for the BLM movement and part of a larger effort to “cleanse” public spaces of protest culture. Much like the hologram itself, which materialized briefly in the darkness before dissolving, the visibility of Floyd’s image – and the movement it was meant to illuminate – now faces the risk of being obscured once more. The same impulse that topples Confederate statues can also erase traces of the movements that brought them down. The hologram, projected onto monuments of the past, now lingers as a digital artifact – one that, like so many images of Floyd, appeared briefly only to fade, its afterlife shaped by history’s shifting illuminations.

Clara Podlesnigg

Clara Podlesnigg is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Digital Film Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her dissertation, written as part of the Research Training Group “Configurations of Film”, focuses on holograms and promises of technology in the context of digital platforms. She is a section editor for the journal Open Cultural Studies and co-editor of an edited collection on stickiness in the field of film and media with Kerim Dogruel and Fadekemi Olawoye, forthcoming with meson press.