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The following text is a brainstorm on Media, and the [un]Dead by xname.
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Three days workshop (or a project) around the thematic of media and the dead. Collaboration between Graham Harwood, Jonny Jemp, Xname.
[Similarity with what J.Kemp calls Death Logic, where death does not exist, there is only a play, and a short circuit to interrupt the play. Theatrical reading of the materiality of the machine.]
how long does it take to die?
To the Yoruba, and similarly to other primitive cultures, death closes the door of physical, visible, bodily existence of a person and opens another door, the door to a new life.
From:
http://www.metanexus.net/conferences/pdf/conference2006/Dopamu.pdf
CHANGE
1. From the heavenly soul to a human being in a bodily form.
2. Death of the body.
3. After appropriate funerary rites, the soul returns to heaven.
All these changes concern the soul and they bring about a change of life, from one state to another. If the change does not take place, the soul as we know it, has no chance of immortality. CONTINUITY
As in the case of change, continuity of life concerns the soul.
Continuity can be
illustrated as follows:
1. Through death, the soul changes its abode and continues existence in heaven.
2. In heaven the soul may have a chance of immortality.
3. Through reincarnation the soul may also return to any of his children.
—
in the delay between life and death there are traces of life:
when the lizard dies
traces of life and movement persist
peripheral parts are alive
whereas the central system is dead
perpetuation
illusion of life
that is life
death is not
in real time
there is a delay
or buffer
to synch life to death
during this time
the distinction between
life and death
can lead to errors.
-→ historical parallel: the bury of apparently dead people, archetypal nightmare of the undead!
errors in judging health, and malady
errors in declaring wisdom, or madness
errors in stating life, or death
Zombies are dead bodies which take commands, like robots
vampires are undead mutating, post-humans having the appearance of living people, they deliver a sort of non-life which is an extended death and does not fulfill itself if not under certain conditions. if a vampire bites a member of mankind, this member will become a vampire. this is viral, exponential.
spirits are immaterial: the body is dead but the spirit is still trapped inside reality
some spirits never had a body, but all ghosts did
PHANTASMA
-→ Greek root
non
body
anima without body
Zombie -->
dead body
non life
body without life and soul
but animated: kinetic power
Spirit -→ (what is the) difference
with
ghosts
ghosts declare an intrinsic relation to a specif body, that which they possessed before death.
spirits are different, they can inhabit different bodies, and different forms, and none. some religions and cultures think of a unique spirit in nature which is the vital force activating all the existing. jinen, in japanese, chi, in chinese. spirits are also called entities, see for example brazillian candomble’.
mediated material life
- the bank account
- bills
- social networks
- skype
- remote presence
- talking at a distance
burocratic death
-→ the decomposition
of the body is not
enough to die
technology can make death apparent
it can also bring back to life
recording of the emotions
what is life?
what is the ingredient we can mediate to bring back life?
About the transition between life and death.
Spinoza: death as poisoning of the relations
About organic, analogical and digital decomposition of a body and its extensions.
EXTENDED BODY OF
THE LIVING BEING
THE WORK OF THE
PERSON I.E.
- A VIDEO WORK MADE BY THE PERSON
- A VIDEO RECORDING OF THAT PERSON
__THEORY OR MAGIC_
or metaphor (mauss)
the part and the whole
contiguity
—> physical proximity
with the dead person → object of
the person etc
-→ digital recording
of an element of
the living person
-→ perpetuation of the act of the person living after
their death through
technology_
ie: a shell
a nick on a
server
a text message
a delayed email
technology does not know about time
technology does not know about death
- a lost letter
- a voice mail recording
how does content / media
change once it is belonging to a dead
person -→ zombification of media
Memory is an element which is common to death and life. One of the functions of media is to preserve memory; this is one of the cases in which media are extending bodies’ capabilities. The body is extended after his death. A cemetery is a physical space built in memory of the deads. Gravestones are media, solid state memory.
From an interview to Kristina Clair:
http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/10/interview-with-indymedia-sys-admin-kristina-clair/
… before computers and emails and blogs, people commonly wrote letters and kept written journals. These things were not things that are necessarily accessible to anyone except those who had physical access. They were private. when that person died,they would go to a family member, probably. Now, these types of things are often not even things that we own ourselves. Most people have email or blogs hosted on someone else’s server, and while they can still access that information, it’s not quite the same as having it physically on paper. That’s a huge history of personal communication that is sitting on a hard drive somewhere, connected to the Internet…
(About the relation between Digital World and its Immaterial Counterpart)
The Net is full of Zombies. The growth of the Net implies an increasing number of different types of dead parts interacting in realtime with other more alive parts. Thus the life of the Net and its Death are not happening in synch with Material World. Google Maps is a fundamental example of real-time zombies: from all over the world images of the past are representing the present state of the physical. Cars already destroyed, dead people, faces of those who relocated to some other country are populating our view whenever we check the best way to get to the closest pizza shop.
What would happen if we would start finding in the Net images stored by a database pointing to the future?
Human beings and animals have many things in common, the most obvious being life and death. It is axiomatic that all living things will die. From experience, however, not all living things view death with anxiety. Animals, to the best of our knowledge, do not have the same attitude that human beings have towards death. Death anxiety is common among many societies, and in Africa as elsewhere, people try to fight death by the use of magic, medicine, ritual, prayer and bodily protection. Elders are not excluded from such care because everyone prays to live to a ripe old age. When a young person dies, therefore, people feel empty and disoriented, and enter into a state of sorrow, melancholy and emotional upheaval.
Sometimes instead of spirit we use the word soul to indicate the animating power of human life that distinguishes life from inert matter…
Animism: some think any object contains a portion of life.
And everything moves: Eraclitus.
Media reproduce, transform and die. Like animals, media do not see death with anxiety and sorrow.
Whole and parts, cohesion, relations, degrees of power …
It is the death of war that kills the valiant,
Death of wather is how the swimmer goes.
It is the death of markets that kills the trader
And death of indecision takes the idle away.
The trade of the cutlass blunts its edge
And the beautiful die the death of beauty.
