I was here : an analysis of a few scenarios from different futures of remembering

Abstract

This thesis joins the eternal process of reaching for the unreachable, mysterious space of non-existence. Instead of defining anything or offering any answers, it makes portraits of a particular phenomenon: the question of remembrance and death in a context of today. What kind of scenarios have been offered for our digital afterlife? How do we want to be remembered after death as our lives become more difficult to grasp physically?

We will meet a man who travels around the world with an uncanny robot, and listen to an artist in the process of inventing an interactive form for expressing grief through metaphysical dialogue. We will explore ideas of an entrepreneur who offers you a chance to live (symbolically) forever as an avatar, and we will focus on a hybrid eternity project, transforming rituals of memorising into forms that may speak more accurately to the mortals of the digital world. We will imagine a never-ending conversation between two lovers.

Behind this curiosity towards the immortal enigma, there lies a wider question of whether our ’less physical’ lives could make us re-imagine, and possibly even notice changes in our beliefs and thoughts about death and remembering.

The methodology of this work trusts in the power of human conversation. Through semi-structured, qualitative interviews with a limited amount of people, the thesis searches for scenarios of alternative futures for the culturally shifting rites of passage. Inspired by narrative approach to research and life, stories are valued as ever-changing material through which we construct our realities – and ourselves.

What kind of narratives do the present-day technologies encourage us to create? How might our increasingly digital lives be changing the way we memorise and mourn?

This work offers a speculative theoretical meditation to a few alternative futures of remembering: apocalyptic self-narratives that make the border between fiction and fact seem obscure.