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!

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

Digital Death Day: London 6th October 2012

Digital Death Day is a series of Unconferences which have been running twice annually since May 2010 in Europe and North America. We are very excited to be bringing this event once again to London! In the past this event has received high profile international press (such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8691238.stm and http://obit-mag.com/articles/life-after-death-in-digital-form). 

Digital Death is the term used to describe the growing issue of what happens to your personas, ideas, feelings and accounts online after you die. This workshop is open to professionals and amateurs alike. Anyone who wants to learn, discuss, ask questions or even display a working product.

Like death in the real world, Digital Death promises to be ever-present in our increasingly digital world. Despite the topics relative newness this is an issue which has already touched the lives of many people who understand its relevance, whether they themselves have experienced loss or whether it is simply through observing the multiple online tributes, RIPstatus's and memorial sites. However systems are slow to change and the companies that house our data often need the pressure of their users demands to alter current practices. We invite you to be part of that change!  

To register for Digital Death Day please visit: eventbrite

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.)