Diversifying Death - Shaping Perceptions for the 21st Century - 27th February 2019

Diversifying Death: Shaping Perceptions for the 21st Century 

Wednesday 27th February 2019

19:30 - 21:00

Stockwell Street Lecture Theatre 004

7 pm welcome drinks

7.30-8.30 pm discussion

8.30-9pm wine reception

Please see the description and Eventbrite booking link below.

The death of someone close changes us - making us reflect on the meaning of our own lives. 

This meaning is entwined with culture, religion, belief and legacy but is also framed by legal and ethical structures that help guide us as a community to consider what to do when someone dies. 

Death and dying can be difficult to discuss, which may impede end-of-life equality and social progress; leaving many people disempowered. Conversations about death often also occur at crisis points when people lack the emotional capacity to reflect on the choices they are making. 

But what does it mean to die in the 21st Century? How can design, technology and religious practices popularised in the 20th Century, help us to speculate on how new technologies and experiences will shift the boundaries of mortality? In the future, will death rituals be further embodied or disembodied? How do new forms of spirituality impact our relationship between our bodies and ritual practices, where new generations use digitaliity as a way of talking to the dead? And what will become of the things we have owned and treasured? Will they continue to tell our stories for generations to come?

Following the success of our panel on Designing Death: Challenges and Aesthetics for the 21st Century in 2017, we are delighted to delve deeper into the role of diversity and belief in death and dying. This conversation pushes us to consider the creativity of belief alongside the complexity of ethics online that constructs new forms of public engagement, expanding the meaning and social consciousness of death and dying. 

Joining us are four exciting speakers, who will approach this topic from a range of disciplines and practises including: psychology and privacy online; physical and digital crafting as ongoingness; death policies and belief in hospices; and compassionate care within the funeral industry.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/diversifying-death-shaping-perceptions-for-the-21st-century-tickets-53685000281

Creative Conversations is a programme of research and events investigating the relationship between creativity, and commerce in the creative industries.

To find out more about Creative Conversations go to https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/creativeconversations/

Love After Death - an interactive installation for Redbridge Library’s The Final Party [18th - 19th May]

Following its debut at NESTA’s FutureFest16 (as part of Future Love) – Love After Death returns to reinvent itself for Redbridge Library’s The Final Party during Dying Matters Week on the 18th - 19th May. 

Love After Death invites you to explore your own legacy with experts in the field of death and bereavement. They will help you chart the myriad of choices in the future showing how death can be approached as creative affirmation - of love and loss.

Venue

Redbridge Central Library, 

Clements Road, 

Ilford, 

IG1 1EA

Timings

Friday 18th May: 10AM - 5PM

Saturday 19th May: 10AM - 5PM 

Expert Talks at 11AM / 2PM/ 4PM on both days. 

11AM – Andréia Martins  – Talk: The Virtual Wake in Brazil 

Andréia Martins is a journalist, anthropologist and a PhD student at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society. Her netnographic research focuses on Virtual Wakes/ Funeral Webcasting in Brazil and the ways in which the Internet can help us deal with death and dying. 

2PM – Susana Gomez Larranaga  – Talk: The Agency of Online Personal Legacies

Susana Gomez Larranaga is an artist working with print, time-based media and installation. Her work recreates human manufactured imprints that merge and decay in nature. Derelict sites, turn into sites of intervention as archaeological repositories. When installing artwork, parallel dystopian realities are projected over the physical realm. In contrast to the ruin, the virtual world challenges the boundaries of human interaction and life-spans. Susana's practice-based PhD investigates the agency of online personal data over a physical space.

4PM – Audrey Samson – Talk: Digital Data Funerals

Dr Audrey Samson is an artist-researcher, resident at the Somerset House Studios and a Senior Lecturer in Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich. She has an active research profile, a thriving art practice and industry experience in digital media and network culture. She has developed numerous interactive installations, workshops and academic publications in the field of digital art in the context of death online, including Digital Data Funerals and has extensive experience thinking through the implications of digital technologies and translating this to engaging experiences for audiences.

11AM – John Troyer – Talk: The Future is Always Death

Dr John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath.His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices, post-mortem bioethics, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk and the Future Cemetery Project, and he is a frequent commentator for the BBC.

2PM – Elaine Kasket  – Talk: All the Ghosts in the Machine: The New Immortality of the Digital Age

Dr Elaine Kasket is a psychologist who writes and speaks to practitioners, academics and the public about death and the digital. She is passionate about telling stories that show how the digital age affects how we live and how we die and has an upcoming book called All the Ghosts in the Machine: The New Immortality of the Digital Age that will be published in early 2019 (Robinson/Little Brown). It aims to get us all thinking differently about death and the digital.

4PM – Stacey Pitsillides  – Talk: Death, Design and the Digital 

Dr Stacey Pitsillides is a Lecturer in Design at the University of Greenwich. Her research actively inquires into how co-design can engage publics to speculatively explore their own mortality and legacy. Stacey's research is grounded in breaking down hierarchies between designers, institutions and users. Through a mix of ethnography, cultural probes and participatory design methods, she has collaborated with hospices, festivals, libraries and galleries to curate a range of interactive events aimed at specific communities e.g. tech innovators, educators and bereaved family members. She is also a public advocate for designing human-centred technologies with death in mind and has written broadly on the topic of death and digitality.

We wouldn’t want you to miss The Final Party!

Death Online Research Symposium (DORS4): The University of Hull, UK, August 15 – 17 2018

The 4th Symposium of the International Death Online Research Network will take place at The University of Hull, UK, August 15 – 17, 2018. It will consolidate links between existing and new network members and provide opportunities for the discussion of ongoing and new orientations in the interdisciplinary field of death online. The meeting will explore the ways in which online connectivity is changing how, when and where we engage with death and dying and how we invest death-related practices with meaning in the online environment. We warmly welcome new members to the network as well as old friends. 

Confirmed Keynote Addresses: 

Professor Charles Ess, University of Oslo, Norway 

Dr Elaine Kasket, psychologist and author of forthcoming book: 

All the Ghosts in the Machine 

Themes and perspectives of the symposium 

For this 4th Death Online Research Symposium we invite abstracts for oral presentations of new, recently completed, or ongoing research or ideas for future academic research on all kinds of death related online practices. We welcome qualitative and quantitative work which expands our understanding of the current and future trends in death online research from a variety of disciplines, addressing any of the following themes: 

Digitally mediated dying and narrative 

Digitally mediated grieving and memorialising 

Death online and embodied experience 

Digital afterlife, post-mortem identity and digital legacy 

Technological developments in the death care industry 

Digital immortality 

Online vs offline experiences 

Theorising online life and death 

Ethical challenges for studying death online. 

The conference will host a special workshop for participating Post Graduate students and early career researchers. We particularly welcome submissions from these groups. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and we envisage publication of selected full papers in a special issue of an academic journal in the field as well as a collection of writing from the symposium in an open-access online platform. 

Important information 

Submission format: 300 word abstract 

Submission deadline: March 15th, 2018 

Submission feedback: April 15th, 2018 

Registration open: May 1st, 2018 

Registration fee: £125 (£75 students). This will cover morning and afternoon refreshments and lunch for the 3 days and conference dinner on day 2. 

All submissions and enquiries should be submitted to Dr Jo Bell: j.bell@hull.ac.uk marked “Death Online Research Symposium Submission” in the subject field. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please include full contact info (name/s, institutional / organisational affiliation and email address) in the submission. Submissions will be anonymised before review. 

The online registration and payment site will be open from 1st May 2018. There will also be information available here for booking options for accommodation. You can stay on The University of Hull campus at The Courtyard for £50 per night (including breakfast) or £45 per night (excluding breakfast). We will make cheaper options such as ‘air b & b’ available where possible. 

If you are interested in joining the Death Online Research Network, please contact Dr Stine Gotved: gotved@itu.dk. 

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.

2nd International Death Online Research Symposium

Call for papers

Digital technologies of communication constitute increasingly omnipresent technologies of life as well as death that structure contemporary forms of sociability, flows of affect and meaning-making.

Following the successful first Death Online Research Symposium at the University of Durham, which marked the formation of the network, the second two-day symposium to be held at Kingston University London in August 17^th-18^th 2015 will consolidate the links between existing and new members of the network and provide opportunities for the discussion of ongoing and new orientations in the interdisciplinary field of death online.

The meeting will explore how we invest death-related practices with meaning in digital convergent media, social media artifacts and networks with a focus on familiar, reconfigured and emergent types of content, contexts, new (mass media) audiences, usage patterns, and embodied forms of experience and expression.

We invite abstracts for oral presentations of recent or ongoing research addressing any of the following themes:

-       digitally mediated dying and narrative

-       digitally mediated grieving and memorialising

-       digitally mediated mourning and flows of affect

-       death online and embodied experience

-       digital afterlife, post-mortem identity and digital legacy

-       technological developments in the death care industry

In addition, we welcome expressions of interest for the screening of short films or the performance of creative pieces related to the themes of the symposium. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and we envisage publication of selected full papers in a special issue of an academic journal in the field as well as a collection of writing from the symposium in an open-access online platform.

Important information

Submission format:  300 word abstract

Submission deadline:   March 20^th, 2015

Submission feedback:  April 20^th, 2015

All submissions and enquiries should be submitted to: deathonline2@gmail.com

marked “Death Online Symposium Submission” in the subject field. Please include full contact info (author name, university affiliation and email address) in the submission. Submissions will be anonymised by the organisers before review.

Review Committee

Dr Korina Giaxoglou, Kingston University, London

Stacey Pitsillides, University of Greenwich, London

Associate Professor Lisbeth Klastrup, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Stine Gotved, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark

HERITAGE AND SOCIAL MEDIA: UNDERSTANDING HERITAGE IN A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

Finally it is here, the long awaited for book on the emergent field of Digital Heritage. Edited by the ever so talented Elisa Giaccardi.

This book explores how social media is constantly reframing our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of ‘participatory culture’ it begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it.

My contribution is to this book is the chapter Museums of the Self and Digital Death: An Emerging Curatorial Dilemma. 

Chapter Abstract: This chapter is primarily concerned with exploring the connection between digital legacy of data that people currently leave behind and how this data can begin to form a part of our collective “digital heritage”. By reviewing current practices around online data storage in relation to memory and death, the chapter considers the value of ‘digital memory objects’ for the growing field of digital heritage. It also discusses the significance and implications of designing new contexts and systems for the future management of personal legacy data. By using the transformative properties of the ‘digital memory object’ itself, the chapter presents various strategies concerning how this data could be both (re)used and (re)evaluated, making it a useful asset in our contemporary collective; for both history and heritage.

Heritage and Social Media can be bought directly from the publisher at: www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415616676/ or ordered from Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Heritage-Social-Media-Understanding-participatory/dp/0415616670

Death Spans

This is an info-graphic which depicts the inequality of how much time each individual has to come to terms with his or her death.

Networks In Crisis: Relative Strangers

Relative Strangers considers the affect 'death' has on family networks in the diaspora. To do this it takes a step back and begins to deconstruct the relationships of family members questioning whether it is possible to form close relationships when mediated over huge geographical distances. By tapping into the rich fields of cognitive science, philosophy, bereavement and virtual management; a proposal is built up which considers the development of a new form of 'audio ritual' (shared broadcast.) Allowing each family member the option be 'linked' through a tapestry of shared soundscapes. By locating this ritual around a fairly mundane event, i.e. eating dinner. The project aims to highlight the opportunity of evoking a new audio-ritual, giving families in the diaspora the opportunity of getting to know dispersed family members on the micro-scale (as you do when living together) without pressuring people to communicate directly.

Project Presentation can be found at: http://www.vimeo.com/11159627



Networks in Crisis : Microsoft Research Lab Cambridge.

Brief: to consider, both critically as design students who are informed by many of the most recent debates within the discourse of design and contemporary social, cultural, and critical theory, and practically as designers who are aware of the radically transformative potential of design, some of those key social, cultural, political, economic and environmental concerns that have arisen latly in relationship to the question of ever increasing involvement in those various "networks" - whether material or immaterial - that are increasingly "in-forming" the very nature of the world in which we currently exist. Microsoft is a major contributor to the field of "network" technologies, i.e. technologies that allow us to create systems or "networks" of communication and connection between different people, places and things.

"how might we possibly design, or perhaps even more appropriatly, re-design or redirect the essential nature of these technologies and the networks that they create in a way that is capable of not only revealing but also possibly remedying many of those essentially dehumanising, disincarnating, and destructive qualities of their nature that seem to be such an intrinsic part of their existence - and the "crises" that they produce"

(5 week project)

The EXbox - a place of rest for that special someone!

The image below shows a snapshot of a persons life. This person is a friend of mine. This friend, like most people, has been through a break-up. The couple in question no longer see or talk to each other.


Fig1: Placing the disk into a safe, out of sight, out of mind

They are both trying to move on but the digital world persists. Hidden among the countless documents, movies, music and other digital data are memory triggers. On this particular day it was too much, so this friend called and presented me with her problem:

"Whenever I look on my computer I can't help but stumble upon pictures of my ex, I don't want to get rid of them but I just can't look at them anymore."

Which immediately led me to see a simple solution. I told her to delete all the images of her ex from her computer and put them instead on a disk and put the disk somewhere safe and out of sight.



Through this simple example I have begun to see the impact of having a chaotic but perfect digital memory. It has made me see the data within my computer as complex 'bits' of information which inevitably link me to the memories, events and documents of my life.

This is a simple example, as it is something that most people can relate to (losing a relationship). However the example becomes much more complex when one considers how to deal with the information of someone who has died. When losing a loved one you may not want to 'put them away in a box.' I have begun to think about potential, physical and digital, resting places which would allow you the space to grieve but also the opportunity to (in time) celebrate a loved ones information (memories).

I have been asked kill your computer.

When a person dies, what happens to their personal computer?

A conversation with a Funeral Director led me to think about this in more detail, the funeral director told me the story of a man who knew he was going to die and had begun to make arrangements for his funeral. One of the things he was most adamant about was the destruction of his computer (hard disk.) He said there was information on there that could potentially hurt his family and friend and therefore he wanted it gone.


This led me to question of there parts of a hard disk that one would ant to 'die' with them and if in opposition the example they were unaware of their death who would take on the burden of this 'killing'?

If a person were to ask us to end the life of their information at the same time as they themselves ended, how would we go about it..? What would be the most appropriate ritual for the destruction of information? Is there something spiritual and personal about using a sword? Would using a syringe be considered more legal, as it is considered to be sterile and medicinal? What roles do you begin to take up when you use these objects and how would it leave you feeling, to be responsible for 'killing' someone's information?


I also wanted to think about the life span and mortality of a person's personal computer, I wanted to engage with the fact that within the digital world we find it so hard to get rid of (or lose) information. We are all digital hoarders, to an extent, and we can be as there appears to be an endless amount of space to store stuff. In the physical world it is both expensive and uncomfortable to never throw out a possession, so one has to select items carefully and only keep what is really important. However in the digital world, we are always finding new ways of 'saving' and 'retrieving' information. We do not spend enough time considering why we actually need this amount of information. As human beings having a 'perfect memory' is unnatural, therefore perhaps we could consider the loss of digital information to be a natural 'culling'.

How could a designer begin to create structures which would force people to lose digital information that was no longer important to them?

Second Life Impersonators

Are there impersonators in Second Life? I have yet to come across any impersonators in Second Life, which i strange as in Second Life you are free to look as you choose...

How would people react to seeing an avatar which resembled a public figure in Second Life...? Why is it ok to impersonate someone like Elvis but somehow wrong to do the same for Princess Diana, could this avatar be considered a tribute or is it just disrespectful?

Public Grief: How have things changed?

The death of Princess Diana was one of my first memories of someone very famous dying. If i'm honest I will admit to remembering more about her death, then her life itself.

Many people refer to Diana's death as being a day that will remain in the 'memory of the British public forever.'

In England grief is generally a private emotion, experienced only within a close network of friends and family who knew the person. Diana was a public figure, 'the people's princess,' this made people feel like they could share in this loss and publicly express the grief they felt. Through this shared emotion a bond was created within the British public, for a couple of days millions of people shared an experience and felt like they had a right 'to grieve'.

"Many people across the country brought [flowers] and placed them along with very personal messages written on attached cards ... A single flower with a message ... read 'Beautiful Lady, Rest in Peace, With Love, Sam (A homeless friend.)' "

The Mourning for Diana (edited by Tony Walter) 1999

Through this example we see how a huge majority of people engaged in communal grief. Public grief is a “way of rebuilding community,” through grief we feel a connection to each other and associate with each other in an emotional way.

After studying the topic of Digital Death, for around a year, the death of Michael Jackson took me by surprise. It was another example of public grief but this time flowers were not the main feature. The death Michael Jackson marked a landmark in digital culture because so much of the public grieving, remembrance and memorialization took place in a digital environment. Many people even discovered the news of his death through online sources and the reaction of the digital community was immense.

Even in somewhere as niche as my own network of Facebook friends around 70 percent of friends commented on his passing, many lamenting this loss in some way, either by donating their status as a tribute e.g. "RIP King of Pop" or perhaps by tagging their favorite song on You Tube. The internet allowed for this connection to spread quickly and visually and Michael Jackson will not only remain in the memory of the public but in their processors and networks.

The presence of the internet meant that any person could quickly and cheaply announce to the world, that they too, were sad that he is gone and that collaborative grieving was no longer focused within a specific community or even a specific nation, now people from all over the world have the opportunity to group together and feel that moment of connection (togetherness.)

What Happens when Virtual Friends Die?

Say you meet someone online, start chatting, e-mailing or gaming together. You do this for say two years, then all communication stops. What do you assume? Do you assume that person has simply lost interest and found a new hobby or do you assume that they are dead?

There are various websites which offer you the opportunity “to search government death records very easily. They vary in what kind and extent of information you are able to extract from them. They are only as good as their database after all.” However in order to use these databases, one first has to consider the possibility that this person is dead, before actively ‘searching’ for them. Today we have virtual acquaintances, virtual colleagues and even virtual friends. If they die, how are we to be informed? Do we have a right to be informed? Can a virtual friend (bit) be as close as a friend (atom)? Are family members aware of all your virtual friends?

Second Life’s ‘Linden Lab’ states that “if there is a legally binding will and testament they will divide assets and inform loved ones in-world of your passing.” However in order to do this Linden Lab would need to be provided with: a testamentary letter or other appropriate order, a copy of the death certificate, a copy of the will and a copy of a government-issue ID sufficient to identify you. This tedious process would perhaps prevent many people from attempting to inform virtual friends. However one must ask, if this process were to be implemented, how far is Linden Lab responsible for the way these virtual friends receive this ‘bad news’ and the aftermath of their bereavement.

Most of our virtual identities do not expire immediately with our body. Digital information tends to have a different set of laws to the physical world. It will generally remain intact until someone decides to close the accounts. Communities such as ‘Friendster’ write in their user-terms agreement that “the provider of the site’s services [are prohibited] from removing your profile without your express consent." It also specifies that a relative must provide “written proof,” which means that grieving relatives must scan and e-mail a death certificate to each of these communities, if they want the persons account to be closed down.

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