Month: May 2022

Positions through Contextualising 3.1

In the end I could not access the ceramics workshop at CSM and was unhappy with the results I was achieving painting at home. Following this, I sought new ways to combine data with the physical forms of the pipes themselves. I settled on using NFC tags as a means of embedding information into the clay itself. Viewers are invited to interact with the piece by scanning the pipes which each contain a link to a certain song. 

I felt that music was a good choice of ‘data’ to use for the project due to its existence in a liminal space somewhere between material and immaterial in nature. Once more, music – whether in the form of ballads, playlists, or mixtapes – has played a part in our mourning traditions from ancient times until today. 

I feel quite pleased with this iteration’s combination of vernacular and traditional forms, as well as its exploration of materiality in that liminal space between our digital and physical realities. Once more,  I was happy to have introduced a sense of tradition to the work that eschewed institutionalism – favouring a pre-Christian Irish practice to that of the Catholicism.

Positions Through Contextualising 2.4

“Another lost tradition is the custom of smoking from clay pipes, which were filled with tobacco for visitors to the wake house to take. People would light the pipe and take a pull, exclaiming “Lord have mercy on their soul”. Non-smokers were fully expected to partake of the ritual and snuff was also taken. After the funeral, the wake pipes were ritualistically broken in two and buried outside. This persisted until the late 20th century, when trays of cigarettes were passed around at wakes instead of pipes, before the custom died out completely.” – The Evolution of the Irish Funeral, Marion McGarry.

Much of my practice Unit 2 has focused on the tensions between what can be defined as the ‘personal, ‘subjective’, or ‘situated’  and the objectifying inclinations of technology. In working through this project, I can see that it is contemporary media rather than technologies themselves (though these intertwine) that is emerging as the primary focus of my investigations. 

I sought to engage with this concept more broadly, whilst remaining within the remit of my current project, by concentrating on the role objects play within our IRL/online lives. I am interested in the idea of vernacular versus institutional modes of grieving and sought to play with this dichotomy in a manner immediate and personal to me. Choosing funerary clay pipes, I have started personalising these cultural artefacts of grief with imagery gathered from social media accounts of those now dead. In this way, one’s personal data (as such objects are in the online ether) inform an existing tradition.

I feel this exploration may bare fruit moving forward, wit the possibility to elaborate on these illustrations, byturning them into paintings and (actual) clay pipes.

McGarry Marrion. (2021).The Evolution of the Irish Funeral, RTE, 19 August. Available at: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0415/1130559-ireland-funerals-wakes-death-rituals-coronavirus/

Positions Through Contextualising 2.3

A short piece outlining some key points concerning death and social media sites. The writing itself functions to clarify and hone my practice around the subject. It is presented as a text cycle on a webpage, an inherently unwelcoming form for an essay that demands concentration and patience from the reader (qualities not usually engendered by contemporary technologies). The background of the site comprises grid a design representing the number of Facebook users who have passed away since the site’s inception – a visual proposition that is flawed and thus provokes questions as to the suitability of the internet as a site of remembrance.

The site is under construction.

https://deathandfacebook.cargo.site

Working Draft.

A few thoughts on Facebook + death. Each icon on this page represents 1000 Facebook users who have died since the site’s inception. At the time of writing, a number estimated to be more than 30,000,000. An inelegant representation for sure. But given the bandwidth restrictions in making this site, it shall have to do. At the very least, you’ll have something to doing with your hands whilst reading this text.

We tend to think of digital spaces as permanent. Once you put it on the internet, it’s there forever! In reality, such spaces are far from eternal. Indeed, they are contingent on a vast range of variables including (decaying) hyperlinks, (outdated) markup languages, (unmaintained) servers, and many more. This reliance on such an expansive infrastructure begets the involvement of corporate supranational organizations in our everyday lives. One does not order a takeaway, message a lover, or pay for the bus without invoking the invisible network that underlines our existence. Now its seems, that even death will not spare you from participation in the hyper-globalised free market. That is not to say that your loved ones may not simply delete your profile. Though they cannot always do so. For the purposes of our (oneway) conversation however, let us imagine your Facebook / twitter / instagram (insert site here) page is maintained. In addition to aforementioned corporate collusion, interesting aesthetic questions arise.

Whilst the materiality of a gravestone may succumb to physical decay, it will retain a shadow of its form until time claims it. The (most likely serif) typeface on one’s headstone does not change. The form of one’s memorial page, in contrast, is subject to the whims of web designers. You may indeed find yourself memorialized under the banner of a corporate style guide. All of this begs the question – are digital spaces really suitable for memorializing the dead? Given the direction or world has been / is / shall be heading in, such is a impotent line of enquiry. Besides, in many ways digital spaces provide fertile grounds for personal and vernacular modes of mourning. Once upon a time, the traditions surrounding death were the exclusive domain of (religious) institutions. Muttered words and sweeping solitudes proclaimed from a pulpit. Now-a-days the internet allows for a secular and personal space in which communities can remember loved ones together in their own ways. This being said, the technological restrictions through which we access the Web 2.0 also present many drawbacks.

To begin with, the same screen unto the (cyber)world which we use to engage with a (web)site of mourning is also the same screen we use to engage with other sites. When the write-up of a family member’s tragic passing exists on an interface, a mere click away from a delightful cat video in the next tab, a certain sacrosanct quality is lost. Moreover, as each person’s Facebook / Twitter / Instagram (insert site here) is viewed in isolation from all other pages on any given site, the communal aspect of traditional places of mourning is somewhat compromised. The immersive web 3.0, as characterised by the ever-approaching metaverse could offer solutions to this. Ever-expanding digital cemetery sites could situate digital memorials to whole communities side by side. But space is infinite in the context of 3D digital worlds, and as a result the objects contained within such space become inherently cheapened by their replicability and scalability. Take this very webpage as an example. The multitudes of people represented therein form but a backdrop to this text and by virtue of sheer number lose all meaning. Digital spaces are not physical, and without a certain level of physicality these spaces remain at a distance from ourselves. Mediated, enclosed within, and contained by a screen.

Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, Kohn, T, Meese, J, & Nansen, B 2017, Death and Digital Media, Taylor & Francis Group, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [17 May 2022].

Greenfield, A. (2017) Radical Technologies. London: Verso.

Positions Through Contextualising 2.1

Building upon last week’s explorations, I chose to continue working with typography; contextualising the typographic choices which underline our lives online and rendering them apparent on the context of death. Moving forward, I chose to contrast my previous iterations which focused on the creative, expressive nature of Web 1.0 web design (specifically the now-defunct Geocities). Rendering gravestones in the typographic styles most prevalent on the internet-of-today, one can see a loss of personality in favour of standardised objectivity. The barrage of contrasting typefaces, bold colour choices, and flashings GIFs has been usurped by a clean, organized aesthetic favouring sans-serif typefaces. An aesthetic that currently informs the online memorial markers for many former users of social media sites whose profiles remain active or memorialized.

Positions through Contextualising 1.5

“ … there is a relative impermanence, fragility, and energetic dynamism on the screen, in some sense reflecting rather than denying the impermanence, fragility, and dynamism of the lives marked by online memorials. Whereas cemeteries and their stones aim to resist change in that they seek endurance over time, the screened web memorials embrace frequent change; the affordances of the media allow the content of web memorials to shift from moment to moment and from day to day, and experiences of web memorials are mediated by the hardware and software used to access them, as well as the vagaries of hypertext links that lead to and from them.” (pp.35)

Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, Kohn, T, Meese, J, & Nansen, B 2017, Death and Digital Media, Taylor & Francis Group, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [17 May 2022].

The role a designer may play in the milieu of such relative impermanence is interesting. Given that our online social media account are fast becoming markers of our passing, a UI designer may be seen to create the aesthetic of a million such digital memorials. Where once gravestones stood largely unaltered until eroded by time, now the aesthetic of one’s memorial profile comforms to whatever current style guide is being adopted by tech’s big players.

A webpage makes clear the impermanence of such memorials, soliciting maintenance donations. In this way, one’s grief and love can also be measured in the market terms that have come to inform the “Web 2.0.”
The self expression of Web 1.0 (encapsulated by Geocities) rendered in the form of gravestone templates. This exploration highlights the aesthetic instability of web memorials, whilst pondering upon the validity of the traditional aesthetic forms as related to death?

Positions Through Contextualising 1.4

Scans from graves at St.John’s Church Hackney (inspired by Eva Frances and Franco Mattes). The scans were used to create a PBR texture map which can, in turn, be used to lend verisimilitude to one’s own digital monument.

Mattes, E and Mattes, F.(2016). Fukushima Texture Pack [Textures Maps]. Available at: https://0100101110101101.org/fukushima-texture-pack/ (Accessed: 15/05/22)

Positions Through Contextualising 1.2

Can digital spaces, through transcending time and distance, provide fertile spaces for communal grief? My primary explorations focused both on the material implications of life and death online, as well as the change from institutional grieving to “vernacular” (Arnold et. al, 2017 pp. 24) modes of mourning as engendered by the rise of social media.

A shared template that encourages those mourning from afar to load items of resonance (this could be facilitated online). . .
…once completed, becomes a shared artefact of mourning / A pyre that can be burned simultaneously at location across the world.

Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, Kohn, T, Meese, J, & Nansen, B. (2017) Death and Digital Media. London: Taylor & Francis Group. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [17 May 2022].