Material Legacies - in the Landscape of the Lost

28th February – 24th March 2017

Register for Private View Tuesday 28th February 

Wednesday 15th March 

Designing Death: Aesthetics and Challenges for the 21st Century – Panel Discussion - Register Here

Location 

Stephen Lawrence Gallery,
11 Stockwell Street,
London
SE10 9BD

This exhibition invites the public to experience how artistic making can provide momentary glimpses of relationships unfolding stories of love and loss.

Material Legacies is the culmination of a four-year research collaboration with The Hospice of St Francis, a palliative care charity. This collaboration explores how artistic making supports the bereaved to negotiate their own approach to translating and finding a place for the dead in their lives. Within this process, biography is distilled into three distinct experiences, which collect a range of materials capturing the essence of the deceased's archive. This deep interaction advocates how a material approach to loss can expand our personal and aesthetic relationships with the dead.

These experiences provide momentary glimpses of relationships - through material and technological composition - that unfold unique stories of love and loss. Visitors are invited to connect with these experiences on a visceral level. The materials used become a language that is refined through the iterative process of making, as stories of the dead are told through the bereaved's physical engagement with materials and their collaborations with creative practitioners. Together the works speak of loss and self-discovery: hundreds of pin pricks turn memory to matter; clay fuses with video constructing the ‘Trainman’; and fingertips massage a message of textured paint leaving their imprint on hand and canvas.

The exhibition as a whole expresses a new materiality of death that blends narrative, craft and archives. This promotes an approach to thinking through making that supports the co-creation of loved one's physical and digital legacies. We are looking forward to present the processes and surprising conclusions to the public.

This exhibition would be of special interest to those working within the boundaries of art and public engagement, co-design and art therapy through artistic practice.

Credits: Material Legacies was created for the Stephen Laurence Gallery by Stacey Pitsillides as an outcome of her PhD in Design. This research is in association with the University of Greenwich (Creative Professions and Digital Art) and has been supported by The Hospice of St Francis and Goldsmiths, University of London. The works exhibited have been produced by Freda Earl, Sam Durant and Anne Marshall in collaboration with Elwin Harewood and Stacey Pitsillides - technical and design development from Aiden Finden and Giulia Brancati. With thanks to Greenwich Bright for the filmed interviews.

Material Environments: Sensing Time and Matter in Digital and Visual Culture

Call for Papers

July 24th-25th 2015 University of Greenwich, London

This conference seeks to explore the points of intersection at which the material and the digital, matter and the virtual, and embodiment and posthumanism push against each other in visual media. Through encounters with cinema, artist’s film and video, installations, and online archives, the aim of the conference is to conceive of new relationships between temporality, materiality and affectivity, tracing the ways in which matter becomes meaningful, or comes to resist meaning, in the digital age. We hope to illuminate the new ways in which digital experiences allow us to think and sense matter and materiality, while reassessing the role of non-digital media in this equation. The conference will trace the implications of the posthuman turn in the humanities, understood as encompassing a variety of non-anthropocentric approaches, on our understanding of matter and affect in visual culture.


The Conference particularly welcomes papers that explore the following:


• the relationship between image and environment, the materiality of filmed nature, and the ‘ecological turn’ in theory and philosophy


• non-anthropocentric and posthuman approaches to visual media, particularly as they affect our understanding of materiality, mortality, and ethics


• the relationship between posthumanism, materiality and embodiment


• the ways in which the digital has reconfigured our understanding of temporality, spatiality, memory and archiving


• the impact of the digital on engagements with non-linear storytelling and locative narratives.


Confirmed keynote speakers:


Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London http://www.joannazylinska.net/

Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgowhttp://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/davidmartin-jones/

Dr Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman


Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by 18th April 2015 to calls[AT]timadi.org with ‘Material Environments’ in the subject line.

This Conference is sponsored by the ‘Time, Materiality and the Digital’ (TiMaDi) research group at the University of Greenwich, and organised by Matilda Mroz, Isil Onol, Stacey Pitsillides, and Rosamund Davies.

An Insight into Digital Death Day London!

Digital Death Day 2012 was an exciting collision of people from different backgrounds, with vastly different experiences and perspectives on the concept of death and digitality. 

We started the day by setting the agenda (translation: writing in that moment what we felt like discussing with the various experts/ interesting people that were in attendance). As a PhD student/academic I am currently putting together a chapter on the relationship between the physical body and technology, including what happens to this relationship when a person dies, so my session was called: Embodiment, Authenticity and Technology (this title was also inspired by Sherry Turkle's recent book: Alone Together). Whereas Andriana (my fellow co-organizer) being an entrepreneur and designer wanted to conduct her session as a kind of mini-focus group discussing various aspects of Announcing Death and Mourning Online as she is in the process of developing a platform which would aid people in this process (further notes/ audio of sessions will appear shortly on www.digitaldeathday.com). 

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

 

Myself and Andriana getting excited about our our discussion topics!

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

As a side note: Digital Death and privacy seem to go hand in hand as a main concern of this community. I don't think we have ever had a Digital Death Day where this was not a central theme and it certainly gets discussed as a part of other sessions as well. There are mounting concerns regarding what will happen to our data after we die including the lagging legal framework, the conflicting terms and conditions of major players in the industry and the lack of education for young people in relation to understanding what it means to post something (public) online. 

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

After some coffee and breakfasty stuff its time to construct the agenda by placing the sessions we want to run on the wall and designating a time and place where that conversation will take place. This is also when the four guidelines of unconferencing make their appearance (the below were very well phrased by The Usual Suspects so I borrowed and adjusted their explanations):

1. Whoever shows up is the right people… reminds participants that they don’t need “world-famous death expert guru X” and 100 people to learn something, or to have an interesting time. What we do need are people who care (world-famous or not :) )
2. Whenever it starts is the right time …reminds participants that “spirit and creativity do not run on the clock.”.
3. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have …reminds participants that once something has happened, it’s done. Spontaneity and ‘going with the flow’ are important, and this is one of the guidelines which creates a space in which unexpected things can happen.
4. When it’s over, it’s over …reminds participants that we never know how long it will take to dive into a topic, once raised, but that whenever the discussion or work or conversation is finished, move on to the next thing.

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

So with these guidelines in mind and a relaxed attitude we begin our conversation about Annoucing Death and Mourning Online: How to strike a Personal/ useful balance, in the comfy chair space ;-)

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

As a second side note: we also had BBC Radio 4 there during the day conducting interviews for the final part of 'The Digital Human' series, presented by Aleks Krotofski, which will focus particularly on the topic of Digital Death. 

  

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

As the day progressed and we felt ourselves losing energy Kaliya (identitywoman) started a doodling session to run alongside our conversation about how terminally ill patients engage with the idea of what happens to their data after they die and how the hospices and old age homes deal with (or don't deal with as the case may be) internet access and patients blogging. 

Photography by: Vered (Rose) Shavit: http://digital-era-death-eng.blogspot.co.il

The day ended with pages of notes and colors, some new ideas, collaborations, contacts and lots to think about and process. Unconferencing is definitely my favorite form of work gathering, as it is really a working event that feel like a social event, made up of people talking about the things they are interested in and passionate about. 

As I was told on my first attendance of an unconference in San Fransisco (the Internet Identity Workshop): the most useful things that happen at a conference do not usually occur while listening to people present their papers. They are generally the strange conversations and serendipitous encounters that happen during the coffee breaks, the lunch and the after party. So we decided to create an event that was like one long coffee break!

Happy Unconferencing!  

A diagram looking at time in relation to digital information.

USB baby

How far can we extend the human memory?