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!

Love After Death - FutureFest

Love does not end when someone dies. 

Love evolves and takes on new forms, 

living on through technology, 

through the earth cradling our bodies and the memories, 

which we keep in our hearts and on our devices.

At FutureFest you will be invited 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 of Love After Death showing how death can be approached as a creative affirmation – of love and loss. By considering your own mortality and what you would like to happen to your body and legacy, our experts will help guide you in setting up your own Legacy Document, detailing the future of your body and extending your presence beyond death. Mortality has always been of fascination to human beings; a curiosity, an artistic endeavor but always a mystery. For generations to come design and technology will play a vivid role in these spiritual matters that speak of our very humanness. However as technology forces us to face what bodies, minds and souls mean to us, will we prefer to live on in reanimation, or continue to live through those we love?

Book your ticket for Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th FutureFest2016

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).

Perfection is not Human - Allow me to Forget!

Lately I have been thinking a lot about digital sharing, what does it mean to 'share' a piece of yourself with a collective and for there to be a perfect record of each of these 'sharings'. How has this record changed the way people interact, argue, get even and even proclaim love.

By leaving behind our 'flawed' and very 'human' memory, I have begun to wonder if in the quest for immortality (of information) we are eroding our power to forget. Forgetting is something which has, throughout time, protected us both from an overload of information and our own past.

Before digital memory, if you had an argument with a friend; they would have their side, you would have your side. Eventually the fight would be forgotten. There was no proof as to who was right and who was wrong.



However if you have an argument with a friend on Skype, your words have a real chance of 'coming back' to haunt you. Your friend can now come back to you three weeks, three months or even three years later with your exact words. They can even have shown these words to various third parties and have received comments and opinions.

The appearance of this document, this non-temporal bit of evidence, means that we can no longer be spontaneous or flippant with our wording. Each word uttered in the digital realm has consequences, not just for today but forever.

"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making. It lets us act in time, cognizant of but not shackled by, past events. Through perfect memory we may lose a fundamental human capacity - to live and act firmly in the present"

Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Vicktor Mayer-Schonberger (2009)

As we inevitably live more of lives digitally and have access (digitally) to a perfect memory of both our own and other people histories. As time (and our lives) move on, there will undoubtedly be an accumulation of digital paraphernalia that we may wish to forget.

Perhaps as a designer I should begin to think about how I could program temporarily, or even decay, into digital information.

Below is an initial thought model which would allow information, which was not being regularly, used to be stored in a repository (hard disk). Information within this repository would begin to decay if not used for long periods of time. This would force the user to engage with the information they wanted to keep and not store things simply for fear of losing them. It would also mean that all information on the desktop was information that was regularly used or looked at.

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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Thinking about Digital Heritage... does the Digital Afterlife offor immortality?

An area which has recently come to my attention and must be considered when thinking about ‘Digital Death’ (and the potential deletion of digital data) is the relevance of that data to our historical and sociological futures.

Regarding archiving, in the non-virtual world, rubbish and buried bodies are an archaeologist’s bread and butter, so is digital information in the digital world. This information has the potential to provide a detailed account of our present digital society and culture.




Through this we begin to consider Digital Heritage, to do this we will first consider the amount and type of data typically being inputted into social networks, including photos, popular music, films etc. We question whether and where information relating to ones digital life should, or could exist, including after death (in other words what its context should be). Should it be placed in a digital museum, at a funeral or in a historical archive? We will look at methods of how one would begin to manage this mass of data once they have recorded it, and who would be responsible for the collecting, archiving, updating, and curating, of this ‘database’ of people’s social networks. This resource would allow historians, anthropologists or even family members to literally look back in time and examine a specific moment of history, pristine and in perfect clarity.