Requeim for my mother’s Data

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

How do we experience the loss of our Data? How can we say goodbye to loved ones' stream of media, and devices that they leave behind? How do we disentangle ourselves from our data when we die? Our artistic research focuses on investigating ways to restore our relationship with the internet and technology, while at the same time unpacking still not enough addressed urgent topics, such as loss and grief in the digital age. Together, since 2022 we started to investigate the dimension of mortality in a digitally regulated, completely datafied society. Spanning this research we have worked on a project called "Funeral for Digital Data", which was shown in ArtVerona in October 2022, and explored the sentiment of grief when digital content is lost, for example when a digital device breaks. We're currently working on a new project expanding on the same research, called “Requiem for my mother's data”, and it is the project we wish to dive into during Saari residency program. This project started because both our mothers passed away and we were both left with their smartphones and their Data to look after. These devices contained their digital personas, their accounts, passwords, active subscriptions, bills, photos, chats, social media profiles and more. We realized that their phones represented their last traces in our realities, through the digital identities they had created for themselves online. Alongside this realization, also the knowledge that they would still be entangled with the digital realm without their consent. We have a practice-based research, that will use performative actions to explore the entanglements of death, rituals and technologies. We would like to use the space and time of Saari residence to perform a liberation of their digital data from the physical person. The outcome of the artistic research will be video documentation of the "funeral" performance and a material experimentation on the objects accompanying the ritual.