Love does not end when someone dies.
Love evolves and takes on new forms.
It lives on through technology, through the earth cradling our bodies and the memories which we keep in our hearts and on our devices. How we die is a profoundly personal journey. Technology plays a key role in holding onto the precious experiences we collect throughout our short lives.
We invite you to join us in exploring your future legacy through a marketplace of speculative design artefacts; hear about the possibilities from our experts talks and collect your own set of Legacy tickets. This pop-up will help you chart the myriad of choices that span the past, present, future and far future of death and dying.
Technology plays a key role in holding onto the precious experiences we collect throughout our short lives. This installation will guide you through the myriad of choices for your current and future legacy. Fear not dear visitor, we are going where many have gone before. From the Egyptians who believed they held the keys to immortality, to Shinto shrines where ancestors remain present, to the ghosts that we all hold in our machines - divine spectres that live in that space between pixel and memory. With digital technology now so embedded in our personal rituals, how can we deal with all the material of the departed in ways that respect their legacy but doesn't completely overwhelm us?
Future marketplaces will have personal data embedded in physical-digital memory devices, techno-home shrines, deletion rituals and reanimation options. You will be able to have digital memorial tattoos and implants, employ a digital auditor and pre-record holograms. You will be able to set up funerals for virtual friends, to dematerialise and rematerialise the body and to 3D print with ashes. You can even grow a new body, or use a robotic body with personal data, recreating your personality.
Together we will explore how digitality has constructed new forms of communication with the dead. But what form does reanimation take? Is it literal or metaphorical? Can it be designed, or is it our ownengagement with what is left behind? And most importantly, is it still human?
Love after Death is a research project that uses speculative design to explore the relationship between technology, creativity and death. It uses co-creation and public engagement as part of an iterative design cycle that aims to produce new knowledge about people’s relationship to their physical and digital legacies. Design and emerging technologies impact how environments, rituals and language are shaping end-of-life practices.
Collaborators
Creative Direction, Concept Creation and Design Research - Dr Stacey Pitsillides
Design production, Digital Design - Giulia Brancati
Design production, Digital Design , Film Post-Production and Marketing - Moira Manni
Design Development and Production - Alice Bertazzi
Design Development and Production - Kornelija Bruzaite
Editorial Design, Concept Development and Visual Research - Maria Vioque
Editorial Design, Concept Development and Visual Research - Shize Zhang
Love After Death was originally commissioned in 2016 for Future Love at NESTA’s FutureFest16 by Dr Stacey Pitsillides with the support of University of Greenwich and NESTA.
