Category: Positions Contextualising

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 2.1

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].

Positions Through Contextualising 1.1

Elaborating upon my Positions Through Iterating Project I chose to focus on the following article from my bibliography…

Tait, A. (2019) ‘What happens to our online identities when we die?’, The Guardian, 2  June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/02/digital-legacy-control-online-identities-when-we-die (Accessed: 05/05/22)

Thinking of the mundane objects that define our lives, I sought ways to use my 3D-scanned objects from the previous unit in ways that underscore the material / immaterial implications of life and death online.

A Digital Funeral Pyre.