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

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

Call for Chapters [Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age]

 

Call for Submissions
Digital Death collection

(10/1/13; 12/1/13)

We invite proposals for a collection of essays on the subject of Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. This proposed book, co-edited by Christopher M. Moreman and A. David Lewis, will consist of 12-15 chapters representing a diversity of perspectives and approaches to the subject. We are seeking submissions for new writing from scholars across a spectrum of fields, including religious studies, theology, media studies, digital humanities, and any other area that explores the topic of death and dying in a digital environment, with reference to religion and/or the study of religion.

Digital Death includes analyses of mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience via a variety of digital media (e.g. Facebook & social media, World of Warcraft & video games, YouTube & video services, internet memorials, etc.). We invite proposals for papers of excellent academic merit on any topic and from any academic perspective or discipline.

Proposals should include a 200-300 word abstract, a one-page C.V., and potential titles for the chapter, submitted to cmoreman@gmail.com by Oct. 1, 2013; complete 5000-7000-word drafts in Chicago format of accepted abstracts will be due by December 1^st, 2013.

For full PDF invite please visit: http://odyssean.site.aplus.net/site/?p=1406

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?