Artist’s Statement
My project is designed to try and target several of the lines that we associate with the grieving process. I intentionally attempt to make both characters unlikable and rather devoid of development in order to focus on and isolate their actions and desires. Isolating these actions focuses on the grieving process and the ways in which they can be healthy, unhealthy, or have negative impacts on others. Another way this is accomplished is through the lack of names, and partial dependence on lower connotation names such as Old Man and Boy despite being family. The use of a Twine word-based game allows people to interact with the process and be as linear or nonlinear as I would like while not limiting the things I wish to accomplish. While there are things that I may have liked to flesh out more such as the game aspect, being able to create win/loss scenarios, I do believe the Twine project functions well as an interactive narrative.
While my personal experiences are not something this work is dependent on they are large influences. There is an individual in my family that likes editing old photos of lost loved ones and that is something that is hard for me to watch, even if someone may have wanted their life to be something other than it was it still seems like a rather large line is being crossed. Actions that alter the memory of one’s life, to me, are something that should not be part of a healthy grieving process. I do recognize that others have their own grieving processes and to them may make sense. While the character is rather apathetic about performing such actions, it is important to understand that I attempted to write the character as someone who is not a good person.
There are several kinds of haunting that I could have implemented in place of a spirit being bound to an object, such as a possession of a human, a ghost that manifests as a shadow of the former self, and a manifestation of the grandson’s imagination that only feels like a paranormal activity for instance. By binding the spirit of the grandfather to a piece of technology the relationship between technology and death is tightened, even if this is narratively separate from the intersection that exists in online memorials. In our age this interaction is closed all the time as physical newspaper obituaries are less common and livestreaming funerals becomes more prevalent.
The grandfather never becomes immortal but by ‘surviving’ his own death he has achieved a similar situation to the CEO mentioned by Hossein Rahnama[1] in that he Is bound to technology and that he is incapable of being more than he was in life. One of the things that is frustrating to me about the situation with Mr. Rahnama is that as a program his ‘immortalization’ is generated from records that can recreate an observed sequence and will never be able to replicate a fresh human experience. Similarly, the grandfather is bound to a phone, and has stopped accumulating experiences as a human. The grandfather, like a program generated from old memories, after his grandson goes out of his way for him so that he may pass the spirit is still devoid of empathy and feels no new emotion when encountering a different experience. Additionally, it is revealed that the grandfather has no true desire to live beyond his mortal life, but simply guessed that was what he’d want. I think that many people who would want some recording of who they were to survive them may not consider that allowing someone, and yourself, to pass is something natural and a part of death.
Another line that I tried to identify is the amount of acceptable apathy associate with the grieving process. Walter discusses the ideas of Geoffery Gorer in his Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain [2]and the idea of the pornography of death, meaning that societies that do not talk about death will become obsessed with things surrounding it. While the ideas are old, published in 1965, the concept that without rituals to address death people can develop psychological problems[3] I think can still apply as the modern grieving ritual is much more visible and social. No longer is mourning a private ritual, as the expectation is often a public expression of grief, be it a Facebook post or social media tribute. For example, rather than visiting his gravestone the friends of a now deceased Facebook friend will often post something to his page on Facebook along with a message. The narrative can push the reader into a situation where they are choosing between two different ways of messing with that ritual in order to increase social presence. While not explicitly obvious while playing of these options one is the best, and results in more people visiting the memorial site, objectively fulfilling the task better.
While the primary reason for creating self-serving characters was more plot based, I also like the idea that It can generate a sense eeriness. As their relationship is defined by their lack of contact it may have been easy to put a non-family member as the haunting figure, but by the “failure of presence”[4] of the total lack of anything that bound them together other than circumstance. Two of three possible endings involve the phone the spirit inhabits getting destroyed and the main character has absolutely no idea whether or not the spirit has peacefully passed on provided they do not fully trust the psychic. The other ending is completely open with no sort of concluding thoughts other than the grandfather is now gone. I attempt to leave out many familiar and expected narrative functions such as development of characters and any kind of fulfilling conclusion, which partially enables the characters to simply be the self-serving jerks that I see in some actions taken in the real world.
[1] Humphries, Courtney. “Digital Immortality: How Your Life’s Data Means a Version of You Could Live Forever.” MIT Technology Review. October 30, 2018. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612257/digital-version-after-death/.
[2] Walter, Tony. “MODERN DEATH: TABOO OR NOT TABOO?” Sociology 25, no. 2 (1991): 295. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42857623.
[3] Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. Salem, NH: Ayer., 1965.
[4] Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. A Repeater Books paperback original. London: Repeater Books.