Workshop: Death Beta

11 Jul, 6.30 – 8.30pm
SPACE Mare Street
£7/5
Buy tickets here

Join SPACE Art + Technology residency artists Digital&Dead (Rachel McRae and Sarah Derat) for an exploration of the ethical, theoretical and practical issues of digital life-extension and memorial preservation.

How does the structure of social media affect our mourning rituals? Who owns the thoughts, words and images we upload to the internet? When the fleshy brain and body is gone, who or what controls the documents, data and social media accounts that continue to 'speak' for us? Could Artificial Intelligence allow us to live on, in some weird form or another, after death? What happens when death intersects with digital technology, and what does this mean for our afterlives?

In this workshop, Digital&Dead will present their ongoing research into the intersection between technology, Artificial Intelligence, death and the 'life' of our data after the body has perished. The artists will be joined by Dr Elaine Kasket who will introduce her in-depth research on the fate of our post-death data and her forthcoming publication All The Ghosts in The Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age (Little Browns,UK)

Both presentations will be followed by an open, informal discussion of post-mortem 'life' after death. This event will give participants the opportunity to share stories, experiences and ideas related to death, memory, social media and digital legacy. Together we will puzzle through the difficult problems (pragmatic, emotional and theoretical) that emerge when death meets the internet.

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Digital&Dead is a collaborative entity (Rachel McRae and Sarah Derat) that explores the issues intersecting online culture, digital legacy and death. Beginning with an Augmented Reality piece in 2017, Digital&Dead has progressively grown into a holistic (often conversational) research and production initiative that currently includes live performances, lectures and interactive digital works. We are interested in what parts of us remain “out- there” haunting wireless streams in the cloud after the body dies, how our digital afterlives are activated and influenced by social media algorithms and how these technological shifts challenge and change both our personal and cultural perceptions of mortality & memory.

Dr Elaine Kasket is a counselling psychologist, author, consultant, researcher and lecturer based in London (UK). An active member of the Digital Legacy Association, Dr Kasket works with students, researchers and writers. She is one of the editors of the latest edition of the Handbook of Counselling Psychology (2016), for which she also authored two chapters on research, and is the author of How to Become a Counselling Psychologist (2017). Her upcoming book on death in the digital age, All the Ghosts in the Machine, is published with Robinson/Little Brown UK (2019).