Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart & Jon Ippolito

Author:Richard Rinehart & Jon Ippolito [Rinehart, Richard & Ippolito, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Digital, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780262027007
Google: dHS7AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-06-13T01:04:27.579026+00:00

Figure 10.1

Alan Watson's computer "urn."

I've not seen this topic covered here before even though it's one that will concern us all at some time: what to do with our corporeal remains after we've left for that great data bank in the sky. For my recently departed brother (long illness, don't smoke!), I thought this nice SPARCstation would be a cool place to spend eternity. Yes, he's really in there (after cremation). I kept the floppy drive cover but for space reasons removed the floppy drive, hard drive, and most of the power supply. I left behind the motherboard and power switch and plugs to keep all openings covered. The case worked quite well at his memorial party. His friends and family were able to leave their final good-byes on post-notes. Anyone who wanted to keep their words private could just slip their note into the case through the floppy slot. All notes will be sealed in plastic and placed within the case. There has been one complication. His daughters like the look of it so much they aren't now sure if they want to bury him.16

Storing away a departed family member in an aging plastic box in the family's living room may not be as futuristic as William Gibson's or Hans Moravec's visions of achieving immortality via silicon, but it is a much more realistic emblem of the precarious nature of flesh and circuits. (Who knew that Post-its would outlive the floppy drive?) This precariousness was not lost on another Slashdot user:

A rarely visiting cousin came over and made a Mii avatar on my Wii box. Subsequently, he died a violent flaming death in a car accident. Irrationally perhaps, I feel like it is my solemn duty to keep `him' alive on my Wii. Make backups of him. Transfer him to my friends' Wiis.i7

The popularity of participatory media has resulted in a virtual whirlwind of data that continues to swirl through a disembodied cyberspace after their creators are dead. Think of executors charged with combing through a relative's "effects" on the deceased person's hard drive, or Facebook's policy of archiving the pages of its dead users (leading to emails reminding you to "reconnect" with deceased friends), or TV news reports of the sound of hundreds of mobile phones ringing among the corpses in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. As appealing as it may sound to live on after death as ghosts in the machine, we should remember two caveats. First, these disembodied deceased do not live on as ectoplasm but as echoes-fragments of email messages, long-gone websites still appearing in search results, photo accounts on Flickr that will never be updated or deleted because the owner has died and the password died with him. Second, these cases of computational media outliving humans are the exception rather than the rule, for their lifespans are still a fraction of their users'; think of how many mobile phones the average person goes through in a lifetime, or how much longer the average Geocities user will live than the homepages each created, which Yahoo retired at the ripe old age of fourteen.

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