RESURRECT.ME 2.0: Invoking the Dead, or on a Thousand (Tiny) Extinctions

• What does resurrection mean in the digital era and beyond religious associations or sentimentality? The virtual and the physical are more entangled than they may seem, blurring the boundaries between the living and the non-living, or further: the dead. The environmental cost of generative AI might be one example. But digital worlds also play a special role in the context of the question of death as such. Around 20 years into the existence of Myspace, Facebook, and other social media platforms, these spaces have been populated by profiles of people long gone. On the other hand, digitalized venues of remembrance multiply: from digital ‘tombstones’ in China, through various memorial websites (commemorating humans and their nonhuman companions alike), to digital transformation of photography in the practices of remembering, like in the case of “New Dimensions of Testimony” by the Shoah Foundation, which enables interaction with holograms of Holocaust survivors. Yet, human (mass) death is not the only one that ‘materializes’ digitally. The Anthropocene necropolitics is being fleshed out in many ways: the sixth mass species extinction, extractivist capitalism- and war-induced ecocide, pollution, toxicity, and slaughter for the sake of slaughter. The more-than-human worlds are dying. While finding new ways of staying with and caring for ‘terminally ill’ environments – to paraphrase queer-ecocritical scholar Sarah Ensor – is a must, there is also a need for cultural and affective ways of working with the actual or potential loss, for communities to partake in. This is where the digital meets the physical, once again. Following this intuition, the present talk will zoom in on new-media artworks, design projects, or digital sound archives that venture into the living/non-living interface by bringing back to ‘life’ – even if for a brief moment – that which in one way or another has been marked as ‘extinct.’ Some of the examples include: Tanja Vujinovic’s “Carboflora,” a virtual environment populated by the plants of the Carboniferous period; C-Lab’s “The Living Dead: On the Trail of a Female,” which uses a drone with a multispectral camera to search for a potential last remaining female specimen of the “Encephalartos woodii” cycad – a plant species that does not exist in the wild; or Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s “The Substitute,” dealing with the extinction of the northern white rhinoceros. What do such projects tell us about practices of remembrance? How are they linked to the de-extinction movement? What do they tell us about our relation to that (more-than-human) which is gone? And perhaps, even more importantly, to that (more-than-human) which is not gone yet? Where does the boundary between the living and non-living run – if there is still one? Who is at the center of digitalized resurrections? These are some of the questions this talk aims to tackle.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Bildkonst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Visual Arts (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Design (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Design (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Konstvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Art History (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Kulturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Cultural Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

death; (im)mortality; digital death; eco-grief; Anthropocene; queer death studies; digital art; new media art; virtual reality

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)