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.

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

DORS2015: Full Programme & Poster

The 2nd International Death Online Research Symposium is fast approaching and we are all feeling the buzz of excitement and looking forward to meeting all the people we have been in contact with over the past months!

Here is the conference poster and full conference programme.

DORSA1_poster_web

We also have a facebook page & Twitter @death0nline

Register for this conference via Eventbrite

Feel free to share it!

2nd International Death Online Research Symposium

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University London
Monday, 17 August 2015 at 09:00 - Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 18:00 (BST) Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom

Symposium Information

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, the second two-day symposium will be held at Kingston University London in August 17th-18th 2015. It 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.

To Attend this event CLICK HERE