This project is the first in a series of explorations on the topic of death and the digital.
* * *
After the passing of an acquaintance earlier this year, I witnessed his friends and family grieve publicly on Facebook. They posted messages that shared memories, referenced inside jokes, and told him that he was sorely missed. They were acting as if he could read their messages; that sending words into the digital cloud was somehow akin to interfacing through the clouds of heaven.
As far as we know, anyone who writes to a deceased person is having a one-sided conversation. To communicate this concept, I worked with an object that universally symbolizes conversation: a telephone.
My first instinct was to buy a telephone and clog the holes in the receiver. That way,
one could talk and talk into the phone, but never hear a response.
Although this successfully symbolized the concept that I was grappling with, I wasn’t satisfied with the altered phone as an art object. Iterating on my idea, I attempted to take the phone apart. However, I didn’t have the right tools and ended up breaking it.
Frustrated, I decided to make a paper mache mold of the phone. Doing so would give me full control over how it looked.
I layered newspaper and paste over the phone, working hard to maintain the fidelity of the armature. Hours later, I cut the dried shell off of the mold and attached the pieces back together.
I realized that the resulting object (and the process I went through to make it) was an interesting metaphor for the Facebook phenomenon I had observed. By “embalming” the phone in paper mache, I preserved some of the its qualities as I translated it into a different format. Yet, the resulting object was only a low-fidelity version of the original. It conjured a real phone, but was not an exact aesthetic nor functional replica.
Likewise, the posthumous Facebook posts were attempts to preserve a relationship with the deceased. However, it would never be the same. My acquaintance’s online profile was just a shell, a remnant of his existence that remained on the internet after his death.
