Goodnight Sweetheart; A digital data funeral
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3610
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Connecting Spaces, Hong Kong
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2015
- URL
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http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29440/
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - Art
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- How is the digital medium redefining our relationship to memory? As human memory is externalised and networked on iCloud, TikTok or Instagram, how does it becomes enframed by the network's materiality: the legal terms of agreement, the code, the protocols of data transfer, the hardware, and the entire geopolitical conditions of its environment? Specifically considering the persistence of data in the network, how might our relationships to death and mourning be reconfigured? How can we use participatory art to investigate the complex relationship between digital death and memory?_x000D_
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Samson began investigating whether erasure could be a method to explore these entanglements. This was done through interviews, workshops, technical experiments, performances, articles and exhibitions with a thematic framework of digital death and datafication. Samson experimented with different material forms of data erasure such as corrosion with acids or embalming with resins. She explored the cultural and political context of data erasure (or lack thereof) through interviews and workshops on the subject of digital death. In the later developed workshop formats, the anchor was the digital data funeral, framed as a ritual that emphasises the embodied nature of data based on the understanding of ritual as an embodied practice (Crossley 2004)._x000D_
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Samson defined the digital data funeral as a visceral and participatory process that physically degrades data, thereby symbolically exorcises the undead media, and creating a tangible ‘memorial’, a set of objects that both embodies and suggests the relationship between digital death and memory. Erasure provided a hook to reflect on network materiality and personal memory. The work also opened up questions pertaining to the crisis of datafication through a mourning ritual that emphasises the embodiment of data.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -