Throughout the studying and photographing of Cave Hill Cemetery in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, I realized that the graves within this legendary cemetery were the closest thing for the dead to still remain alive for those who would come and visit.  Cave Hill is known for the prestigious and life-like statues and memorials for those buried there.  When visiting this national landmark in my hometown, I realized that capturing the photos of those almost “living” statues made the dead feel alive.  Seeing the faces, pictures, and house-like structures for these graves made me think those buried were waiting to be let out and just needed someone to show others that they’re still alive.  With this in mind, capturing the most eloquent statues and adding a life-like movement, such as glitches, to these photographs allows for the audience to feel as though the dead are moving their own picture that was captured of them.  It adds a depth that the dead want to show the living that they’re very much alive, so to further this dimension I compiled all the glitched images into an Instagram page called “TheLivingCaveHillCemetery.”

Within this Instagram page, it is seen as if it is controlled by a single dead soul whose afterlife presence is controlling the narrations of the captions.  As the audience is observing the main overview of the account on Instagram, there are exactly twenty photos, twenty signifying the date August 20^th of 2008, the date where the cemetery was officially recognized and finished after all of the renovations and corrections.  Though this cemetery was finished being built in 1913, I felt as though the exact date of when final renovations were completed was more significant for death within the digital realm, bettering the application of technological concepts. The profile picture is left blank, to add more anonymity and an eerie presence for the audience that keeps them wondering who really is narrating the stories on the page. This concept also works hand in hand with the idea of no title or “name” for the account.  Usually for an Instagram account, a user creates an @ handle, as well as a name for the account on the side (people would normally put names within this space, where it is bolded and clearly shown who runs the account on the overview of the page).  By adding the concept of no name, it emphasizes the anonymity concept even further.  Underneath the description of the page, there is a link that directly brings the user to the Find A Grave website, a website that allows people to search for a buried loved one in specifically Cave Hill Cemetery.  I added this to allow for people to really connect with those who are buried in this area, and further adds a living element to the dead who are “taking over” the page.

When scrolling through the feed of the page, every single post is a glitched black and white photograph accompanied by a caption that explains how the statue or grave is representing the rest of the afterlife presence within the cemetery.  The black and white significance allows the user to focus on the graveyard/grave rather than the distracting colors surrounding it.  As for the glitch, the randomized and almost lifelike touching of the photograph adds an element of life, as well as interaction with the dead person or “statue” being photographed.  When originally taking the photographs, I wanted others to see my vision of the environment around me.  As Susan Sontag writes in her book On Photography,

A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event within itself… While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind the camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all (11).

With this said, by taking into consideration the lens of the photographer and the importance of their interpretation of the event occurring, a photograph will never die and will continuously live on.  This was the intention of the glitching, to keep the life-like appearance “living on” and continuously haunting the photograph on a digital level.  I programmed a line of code to generate any picture inputted into a glitched piece of art, considering the thousands of different combinations that glitching effects can add.

The captions that are narrated with each post explain the situation of where the statues are placed and what the context or action they are displaying is.  In addition, the location of every single post is the same: Cave Hill Cemetery & Arboretum.  The captions contain first person descriptions, as well as always end with the word “here,” emphasizing the location that is posted with the post as well.  Having the simultaneous addition of the location and the captions seeming as though they’re being narrated right from Cave Hill allows the audience to feel “haunted” by this dead soul right on their phone.  Adding a dimension of place and linking it to the context of the post ties in the element of aura being constructed around one’s technological device they’re viewing Instagram on.  As Zane Verdina writes in A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: Storytelling with Instagram,

A photograph is fossilized light, and its aura of superior evidential efficacy… therefore provides a way proclaim success and to preserve them. For each individual these are “good moments” which are transformed into “good memories” (33).

In this context, these photographs within this page “transform” the aura of a simple photo from a moment into a memory.  With the caption, glitching effect, and location all combined into each post, this moment taken at this cemetery is instantly deepened into an experience, as the audience feels as though they’re reading a live caption update about the dead souls represented as statues, and emphasize that no matter how much time passes by, they will always be haunting and bring life to their photos of them as long as they’re buried at Cave Hill cemetery.

When the audience scrolls through each intimate caption, each one uses verbs such as “us,” “they,” and “he/she” in all but one post.  There’s one post that pictures the top portion of a cross, as well as a small photograph attached for the girl who had passed.  This post uses “my,” as in referring to herself in the first person.  While the other posts were more narrations of what was happening in the afterlife community around her, I wanted to add an extra element with the post that I personally think haunts the feed the most.  Pictured is a younger, beautiful girl named Stephanie, and by allowing the audience to put a name with a dead face and a grave further explains my entirety of the project and feeling connected and haunted with the movement of the dead.  Because she is so young and the only post where users can see a human face, it feels as though she should still be alive and should be living her life with any other young adult on social media platforms.  That’s why, in this case, I formed this particular post so users can imagine the face behind whose supposedly running this account.  This particular element made me think of the article “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography” by Bethan Bell.  The main of the article identifies how in the Victorian ages, though kids and older relatives would pass away, in remembrance of them there would still be pictures with their dead body alongside the rest of the live family.  This same idea is displayed with a high-quality picture of this dead young girl on a grave.  It brings the same haunted aura to the viewer, realizing that this person is no longer with us, and there is all but a picture of her left on her grave above her dead body.  Christian Metz also associates his article “Photography and Fetish” along the concepts of death staying alive within a simple screenshot.  He writes,

Photography is linked with death in many different ways.  The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive… We appear to be changing through a photographic mirror overtime appearing ageless as we go, however those who are dead will always remain within the boundaries of this mirror for us to remember them by (Metz, 84).

This links in with the connection of death within my Instagram page and how every photograph is essentially a mirror that reflects the last image seen of this loved one, leaving a “glitched” mark on those who view it.

With all of this in mind, the idea of a haunted media page within the Cave Hill Cemetery adds depth and dimension within the realm of death photography.  This concept allows for the user to feel as though the afterlife presence of the dead being is wanting them to see their lively movement, or glitching, while on this online page.  It’s as though the soul is communicating to the main profile on this account, Stephanie, to narrate what event or scene is occurring within someone’s photo. This act of communicating between the digital dead and through the user behind the screen is an element that links death in the digital age to the physical dead themselves.

Works Cited

Bell, Bethan. “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News, BBC, 5 June 2016, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581.

Metz, Christian. Photography and Fetish. MIT Press. Volume 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/778490.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin Books, 1977.

Verdina, Zane.  “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Storytelling with Instagram.” Universiteit Antwerpen, 2013.

For my haunted media project, I decided to create a realistic but fictional memorial website, called In Memoriam, where ten fabricated people died from a tragedy that never actually happened. I used AI-generated photos from thispersondoesnotexist.com and names generated from name-generator.org.uk in order to create these made-up people, and I randomly chose a residential building electrical fire in the (real) city of Fresno, CA on January 13, 2015 as the cause, location, and date of their deaths. I also used a birthdate calculator to determine the victims’ ages and a job generator for their careers, but used the names of actual schools and workplaces in Fresno in order to further the story’s realism. My website is an example of a grief-centric project, and it features an “About” page explaining the fictional purpose of the site, a “Guestbook” page with messages from the imaginary community, and individual pages for each of the fake victims relaying their birthdate, job and interests, surviving family, and more. I also included a few photos of candles as a nod to the “light a candle” buttons on some of the online memorial sites we looked at in class as a digital attempt to embody or convey physical expressions of grief and remembrance.

I wanted to create a memorial site for a fictional event featuring imaginary people in order to explore the connection between grief and online memorials in a way that would allow the viewer to reexamine their own ideas of communal versus personal grief. My project was intended to make the viewer think about the reasons people would create memorial sites for their deceased loved one(s), whether solely for one’s close friends and family to share memories or as a more public space where others can share their condolences.

In this same vein, Aaron Hess argues that “memorializing on the web is a unique form of communal and vernacular discourse. Using the internet as a specific form of representation, the commemorating webmaster enters the public domain in order to memorialize; this opens space for communal memorializing, but also hampers the commemorating individual’s ability to speak without barriers” (813). I would say that Hess’s last statement is true because, whether someone has created a memorial site themselves or is simply interacting with one through a message, comment, or guestbook, this interaction will always be one degree removed from, for example, speaking or praying at a loved one’s grave. This is mostly due to the fact that these websites are extremely public spaces, where anyone can go and view the profiles or memorials of those who are recently deceased.

On a related note, according to the article, “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead,” one of the unique facets of online memorials is that “the Internet offers the ability to memorialise in a public place, where anyone can visit at any time, without imposition to others, and without interruption to themselves” (Veale). The immediacy and simultaneous public/private sphere of online memorials were some of the reasons I chose a digital format, rather than some sort of physical shrine, for my grief-centric project. Veale also writes, “So what can cyberspace offer memorialisation? Cyberspace lacks physicality but … can be a spiritual space. Several authors agree this notion extends to memorialisation practice” (Veale). The same is true for my project because the entire site is an example of memorialization without physicality, and potentially a spiritual space for the victims’ families as well due to the images of candles featured on certain pages.

Likewise, in the article “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” Connor Graham et al write, “We show that … online memorials mark a less bureaucratic, more individualised and neo-modern approach to memorialisation where the dead, once again, become part of everyday social interactions and so are given an existence. We also show that online memorials … focus on the immediate family. More speculatively, we suggest online memorials support the wider engagement of a grieving public” (38). These statements are true for my own fictional online memorial as well. For example, the site is meant to be a place for both the imaginary deceased’s immediate family and for the fabricated wider community to come together in memorialization and grief as a part of daily social (media) life. The “Guestbook” page in particular represents this, as it features a form for the user to fill out if they wish, as well as entries and signatures from made-up family or community members to add to the realism of the story. Furthermore, Graham et al also recount that “Web memorials not only mark resistance to the bureaucratisation of memorialisation and a move towards postmodern death rituals but … they also … support continuing bonds between the living and the dead” through “three types of memorial content”: a letter to the deceased, a eulogy or obituary, and a tribute (39). On In Memoriam, all three of these types of memorial content are represented. The letters to the deceased are featured on the “Guestbook” page, in the messages that the imaginary victims’ family members have written to their loved ones; the site itself and its separate pages on each of the victims function as both a group obituary and individual obituaries; and the fictional Meg Stafford’s guestbook entry serves as a tribute thanking the members of the community for their creation of the site.

Another point that Graham et al make in this article is that, “Rather than being a place of internalisation, of quiet contemplation, the Web memorial answers the question of what the bereaved are thinking and feeling, at times communicating ‘wrenching expressions of grief and loss’ (Foot, Warnick, and Schneider 2005) and showing grief as individuated in its expression and extent” (51). The same is true for my memorial site; both the “About” and “Guestbook” pages display community expressions of grief as well as individual ones, leading to a more holistic view of the online grieving process as a whole and a comparison between public and private grief.

In Mark Fisher’s article, “Approaching the Eerie,” the author explains the concept of the eerie as occurring “either where there is something present when there should be nothing, or when there is nothing present where there should be something” (61). Something that I found particularly eerie in regards to this project was the AI-generated photos of the “victims” because of how realistically they depict people who do not actually exist but instead were created by an AI that learns facial features from a database of celebrity faces and generates artificial face photos that become more realistic over time. Another aspect of this project that I found eerie was the act of creating a memorial for people who were never real, because it caused me to think about and wonder what sort of memorials might be created in the future, online or not, both for those people that I know and those that I do not. In the words of Fisher, “We are compelled to imagine our own world as a set of eerie traces,” and these eerie traces are precisely what the act of creating this project made me confront (63).

The process of making an online memorial was, at times, difficult for me, even though I have not (yet) had the personal experience of grieving the death of a close family member or friend. Sometimes I would catch myself looking on real memorial sites for examples of phrases to use or I suppose the word would be “inspiration,” and I would feel a pang of guilt for appropriating and perhaps even tokenizing the real experiences of grief that people feel every day when their loved ones pass away. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to create a fictional tragedy with made-up people, rather than basing my project around true events or real people, was to avoid the so-called “grief porn” that might come from focusing so strongly on the victims and/or perpetrators of a true event such as a murder or suicide. Another unexpected aspect was that I had a bit of trouble constructing my—for lack of a better word—characters’ identities and family members in a way that was simplistic, but still felt real to the viewer or reader. It was also somewhat eerie to me to be creating these two- or three-sentence snapshots of people’s identities, despite the fact that they didn’t actually exist, and it made me realize just how superficial and unrepresentative of someone’s full personality an obituary, online or not, can be.

In summary, the haunted media project provided an opportunity for me to delve deeper into the topic of memorial websites and how people grieve online, both privately and publicly. The process of going through this project also made me think on a more personal level about digital identities, and more specifically, the digital afterlife. My intention was to have the viewer think about these issues, and the reasons people create these sorts of websites to remember their deceased loved ones, as well, and hopefully my project achieves this goal.

Works Cited

Fisher, Mark. “Approaching the Eerie.” The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, pp. 61–64.

Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–53, doi:10.1080/1472586X.2015.996395.

Hess, Aaron. “In Digital Remembrance: Vernacular Memory and the Rhetorical Construction of Web Memorials.” SAGE Publications, vol. 29, no. 5, 2007, pp. 812–30, doi:10.1177/0163443707080539.

Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web As A Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead.” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 3, 2004, http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/.

As we become technologically advanced, we are inclined to channel our emotions through digital platforms. Whether it be uploading photos of a lost one or ranting on a situation online, these posts that we upload to the web become eternal. Our power to take back anything that goes on the internet cannot be done. One of the main elements of uploading things online is that it allows many people to live beyond their deaths. Specifically, one of the many forms that individuals have become eternal is through the use of social media in which their loved ones create memorials to remember their lives. However, social media had always this culture of following trends and seeking the new. Therefore, I find that such memorial pages to be less impactful today compared when they were heavily used on Facebook. Although some platforms still remain to use the network as a way to mourn death, the fact that technology is revolutionizing quickly creates this urge to create endless possibilities of connecting the digital to the physical space. In other words, technology can improve the ways in which we mourn on social media by creating platforms that push the boundaries of the physical by going beyond a touch on a glass screen.

To begin with, I will review the context of online memorials and why using social media to mourn is essential to my haunted media project. In Connor Graham’s journal, “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” he explains that the significance of the World Wide Web is to have online sites that can be used for commemoration and different kinds of support: emotional, informational and instrumental(Graham, 39). The power of the internet allows people to compose pages where the lives of people who have passed away can be shared with friends and create a community that pays respect to those individuals. These memorial pages not only inform the public on lives that have been lost but as well as express the positivity that those individuals had spread (). The positive aspect is that much of the focus lies when mourning is done online. Rarely do you find individuals post information that puts those in that have died in a negative light. For instance, in Whitney Phillips’s journal, “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online,” she explains that the tragedy of an American model named Chelsea King had a Facebook memorial in which individuals had posted their condolences and sympathetic comments on the page. Some of those posts had a similar tone of positivity in where Chelsea had left the world creating a positive impact. Some of those statements were like “heaven is lucky to have you, look out for your family, send my best. (Phillips, 1).” With this example, it demonstrates that memorials have the ability to create this emotional support. It creates a community where the internet allows people to connect through the death of an individual because they both have the same feelings towards death.

Knowing that these memorials connect individuals, I used an online social media platform known as Instagram to present the lives of firefighters who had lost their lives saving people from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The reason why I decided to use the platform of Instagram rather than other platforms such as Facebook is that Instagram focuses on the image of individual experience. Therefore, using Instagram, I am able to create a physical connection to those posts and prevent further distractions such as other people posting on the page. Although Instagram makes my memorial page interaction limited in which people are only able to comment underneath each individual post, the focus remains on the image. The reason why having distractions on the memorial page was something that I was attempting to avoid is because trolling of memorial pages has become an epidemic on social media. The trolling of memorial pages have been viewed as a form of commentary about the way people have shifted the way they mourn and perceive death. Phillips explains that people that are trolling online force their “victims to confront precisely those things that motivate the popularity of memorial pages — fear of helplessness, fear of losing a loved one, fear of human parts” (Phillips, 6). The aggressive approach to death has been popularized by these individuals to shift the way of thinking about death to a darker comedic way. It is an attempt to make fun of death to a point where it can be made accepted through humor in order to ignore feelings of grief. However, the haunted media project that I have composed prevents such trolling memes to arise and limits people to post. It becomes more of a gallery memorial.

This effect of a gallery memorial further strengthens my goal of creating a space to ponder on the images of firefighters who have lost lives. Specifically, part of the haunted media project involves holograms. Combining the digital space to the physical extends the boundaries of thinking about memories. Michael Talbot explains that holograms are just 3-D photographic images that are created through lasers (Talbot, 1). For my haunted media project, I created an illusion of a hologram by creating an acrylic plastic pyramid that uses the reflection of images coming from the screen. Although these images are not true holograms, the illusion still represents a 3-D image that is not accessible in regular social media. The reason why I decided to use holograms as a supplement to the memorial Instagram page was to allow viewers of the page to engage with the images of individuals who have passed away rather than think consciously about what they will post as a comment on each post. In social media, individuals have a tendency of reflecting what they upload to the network because that information forever gets stored in the cloud of information (Abbe et. al, 2). Therefore, individuals perfect a post in order to not only be respectful to the related family members of the individual of the memorial page but also allow others to see what they have stated. However, using a hologram keeps a viewer engaged with a 3-D model of the individual and plus adds this effect of the eerie in which the image becomes an associate memory in what the person actually looked like in a 3-D aspect.

Additionally, another element to the haunted media project was the theme of firefighters that had lost their lives during the terrorist attack. The reason why I decided to use such individuals for the project was that these firefighters can continue to live to remind people that their service to the country does not go unrecognized as we get a new generation of people who were not alive during the incident. According to Susan Sontag’s article, “On Photography,” she states that photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow (Sontag, 17). Therefore, these images of firefighters came to be an engraved image that reminds these individuals that these people voluntarily placed themselves in situations that other individuals would not do. It adds an element of remembering these individuals as people rather than just a statistic of lost lives. Furthermore, the firefighters that had lost their lives during the terrorist attack do have a physical memorial in New York, yet many lack photographs of what they looked like. Part of death and funerals is perceiving death as aesthetically pleasing. In a BBC article that looked at Victorian culture demonstrated that these individuals were so accustomed to the death of a family member that they decided to take photographs of dead family members in order to remember their existence in the world. Although the photographs of the dead were a practice of mourning and memory, these individuals had made death beautiful by dressing up the dead individuals in fine clothing and jewelry. Today, we continue to take some of that culture by dressing up the dead in their coffin before their burials. Similarly, in my haunted media project, I found that the holograms would imitate this idea of glorifying death and perceiving it as beautiful. The images become the center of attention because it is transferred from this structuralized social media platform with options to interact with the photo to only looking at a 3-D image.

In the end, I found this haunted media project to be a foundation to the start of a new way or mourning. Often times people who have lost lives tend to reflect on the moments of dead individuals through photographs, videos, notes, etc. However, implementing technology such as a hologram would take this practice of mourning to a new level in which the 2-D space on your social media becomes 3-D. The idea of recreating those pictures and images and putting them in a 3-D presentation in the physical space would create a form in which people continue to interact with those individuals who have passed away in front of their eyes and space. Despite the holograms being more presentative of a ghost of those individuals, these images really allow individuals to engage with a physical representation.

Link to Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/9.11graveyard/

References:
Abbe E. Forman, Rebecca Kern, and Gisela Gil-Egu. “Death and mourning as sources of community participation in online social networks: R.I.P.pages in Facebook.” Volume 17, Number 9 – 3 September 2012
https://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3935/3288
doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.3935

Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 37–53. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/1472586X.2015.996395.

Jessa Lingel (2013) The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief, The Information Society, 29:3,190-195, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2013.777311

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.”First Monday, Volume 16, Number 12 – 5 December 2011 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115

Sontag, Susan. “On Photography”. Published by Penguin Books. 1971.

Talbot, Michael. “The Holographic Universe: Does Objective Reality Exist?.” (1991): 1988-2008.

The lyrics to `“I wear my grandpa’s clothes, I look incredible”  briefly defined the ethos of fashion for our generation. Thank you kindly Macklemore and Ryan Lewis for “Thrift Shop.”

Stores like Urban Outfitters, Reformation, and Etsy offer “vintage sections.” Youtubers claim boldly and often that they source all or most of their clothing from thrift stores. #Goodwill is now a trend and not as much an emblem of an impoverished financial situation. We’re in the midst of a cultural reverse obsolescent: everything old is new again.

But how many people know that a lot of the clothes they’re #thrifting are likely sourced from dead people?  As one of the largest non-profit retail organizations in which clothes of any kind can be donated for a small refund, it’s no surprise that many, such as my parents, have used Goodwill to lay their loved one’s items to rest–or rather, to resale.

Therein lies the joke, one man’s funeral garments are another twenty-something’s new “threads” or as my friend Alex once commented on a Goodwill shopping  trip “fruits of the Tomb.”

Enter the morbid irony of my project: “Deadpop: An Immortal Thrift Store.” Playing on the thrift app “depop” in which users sell their own clothing, “Deadpop,” focuses on the ways in which “thrifting” clothing is also partially “thrifting” or “recycling” someone’s identity, in this case the identity of the recently deceased  (“When Someone”).

Deadpop’s structure is somewhat simple: It’s a clothing store, like any other. However, it’s packaging comes with a story (after all, we all like brand transparency nowadays) and that story is of the item original owner who has recently died.

Link to Website (Private) https://threadedanddeaded.squarespace.com/config/

Password: deadpop

Take for example Deadpop’s feature of Kate Spade, who committed suicide late last year to the horror of many of her brand lovers, and of course, her family. Deadpop claims to offer Spade’s own famous black cardigan. The price–a hefty $16,500–reflects the nature of Spade’s celebrity status and the gruesome quality of her death.

Pricing for each clothing item fluctuates along a slightly different range: the more expensive the item, the more gruesome the death, or the more famous the death-ee, ehem, “recently deceased.” We like to say every purchase comes with a little haunting of it’s own. By this we mean, every package is accompanied with a certificate of death (unofficial), the story of the piece of clothing and its previous owner, along with their listed date of birth. The website’s product description includes digital links to obituaries and/or news articles referencing their death as well as the cause of death. Deadpop additionally offers customers the opportunity to broker a deal. If a customer has had the misfortune of finding themselves with a recently deceased family member’s clothing on hand, they can sell it to Deadpop (with the stipulation that the clothing is not to be washed prior–to keep the “aura” of the previous owner on the item) (Chin 146-147).

Deadpop’s locus of haunting rests in this notion of eeriness. Haunting or ghostliness become traceable in the presence within the buyer’s mind that what they are purchasing has undergone other ownership. We begin to be able to parse the subject of death in society as one inflected immeasurably with capitalism, as materiality becomes a marker of death, so too does property possession. I.e the joke on the website, “do you possess your items or do they possess you?” The “About” page indicates this awareness in its tongue in cheek imperative “Bring fashion back to life.”

On the literary level, a strange turn, this project is somewhat derived from Ernest Hemingway’s rumored “Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn” (though this is a misattribution to the author) (Wright) .In this poem-prose, death is narrated solely through the language of sale. We know a person is dead, because they are not longer in need of the material affects that would have characterized their existence.

The digital shop also plays on notions that the morbid curiosity infused in the pricing of the objects infuse a kind of essence to the objects (Chin 146). By pricing the objects in relation to “aura” rather than cost of production, the website seeks to monetize this essence as tangible “signifier” of death (Baudrillard, Chapter 3). In the same way that Hemingway’s short story parses death through the language of capitalism, Deadpop makes literal the notion of obsolescence as a cultural recycling function (Wright).

The tone of the project is meant to inhabit the kind of insensitive tone regarding memorialization that has characterized many of our class conversations regarding the presence of death within the digital sphere. Call our site a sort of aesthetically pleasing troll. As Whitney Phillips says in her study of “memorial trolls,” Deadpop plays on the unfortunate circumstance that sorting through a dead relatives intimate belongings requires. Part of the task of dealing with dead bodies is the labour necessary to rid and organize/compartmentalize the deceased’s objects and property. This sentimental journey enforces an economic lens onto the dearly beloved’s remaining relatives. Deadpop adds a on-the-nose humor to what is generally an incredibly emotionally taxing and tedious aspect of the afterlife–the emotional and physical junk that remains.  

One personal essay published in Racked titled “When Someone Is Gone, But Their Clothes Remain, Jess Bergman reflects on this process as she experiences the death of her father. Bergman writes,  While photographs are, by nature, as Susan Sontag writes, already “memento mori,” clothes and accessories aren’t made for posterity, but for people; what to do with them can prove a greater challenge for the recently bereaved” (“When Someone”). Bergman goes on to claim that clothing is more emblematic of a person’s life, than per se a photograph, “This is in part a result of clothing’s symbolic power, but also in part a reflection of material reality.” (“When Someone”). Therefore Deadpop as a project is both grief-centric and haunting-centric. Clothes are both infused with grief and a kind of afterlife. 

The theoretical basis of this project rests in the idea of imprinting–that humans leave or perceive to leave by themselves to leave some effusion of themselves in their objects. Their alteration of these objects in turn becomes a kind of living haunting, whether that be through smells, stains, frays, patches, and holes left in a person’s garmentry. Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death,

“The aesthetic of renewal: fashion draws triviality from the death and modernity of the déjà vu.This is the despair that nothing lasts, and the complementary enjoyment of knowing that, beyond this death, every form has always the chance of a second existence, which is never innocent since fashion consumes the world and the real in advance: it is the weight of all the dead labour of signs bearing on living signification – within a magnificent forgetting, a fantastic ignorance [méconnaissance]” (Baudrillard, Chapter 3).

The “fantastic ignorance” of which Baudrillard speaks to the generational propensity to constantly date themselves in clothing that is not contemporaneous, which begs the question, if we’re wearing the clothes of those before us, what is our “new” fashion but the skeletal remnants of those before us.

I want to turn to Elizabeth Chin’s experimental work My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries to further illustrate the cyclility  that Baudrillard touches upon here . As Chin relays her feelings attached to objects of purchase, she evaluates the term “dead pawn,” which essentially means items that have been pawned with the intention of rebuying, but become defunct due to a lack of payments. Chin describes the feeling of owning dead pawn or encountering it as follows,

Dead pawn has been fully alienated from its past owner, removed from circulation within that person’s life, and is now available to be purchased by someone new… Let me clarify: what is creepy and repellent is precisely that the object has not been fully alienated from its previous owner and that the essence  of the previous owner somehow imbues the object with added aura (Chin 146).

Chin claims that this specific quality rests in this as a partially familial alienation. Chin writes,“With some objects, this lingering aura would be a positive—with my grandmother’s rings…With a stranger, though, and with an object like dead pawn that speaks of another’s desperation…the aura is a dark shadow, not a halo” (Chin 146-147).

Chin’s feelings of disorientation and discomfort in the face of dead pawn perhaps also represent san issue inflected by the eeriness of the object. As Mark Fisher writes in “Approaching the Eerie,” eeriness is predicated on the existence of nonexistence of the subject, or rather the “liminal” space between “presence and absence” (Fisher 61).  in this case, the owner of the pawned object is both present and absent, disappeared and yet also remnant. Bergman notes this phenomena as the “uncanniness” of “remnant” clothing (“When Someone”). In Chin’s piece, the previous owner of the object is both present and not present, and thus becomes auratic.

Therefore, this project is one which understands grief as a “material reality”–one which is suffuses itself in our tangible objects (“When Someone”). Often the most hard to part with objects are those that are the quotidian reminiscence of someone: their eye glasses, the worn scarf they wrapped around their neck winter after winter, a favorite pair of lived-in shoes. Deadpop dwells in this sentimental refrain of clothing and capitalizes on it. What the company ostensibly sells is this sense of intimacy and packages it as buyer intrigue. This is why each of the product description names utilize nicknames generated by the sight–this acts to partially construct a simulated signifier of familiarity with the dead subject. Another notable aspect of the site’s product layout is the way in which the product images are shaped in elongated rectangles to subtly connote coffins. It as if the buyer of the product is reaching into the deceased persons coffin and thieving them of their funeral garments.

Citations:

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, Revised edition., Revised ed.,http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526401496 SAGE Publications, 2017.v Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

Chin, Elizabeth. My Life with Things : The Consumer Diaries. Duke University Press, 2016.. Duke University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374268 Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. A Repeater Books paperback original ed., Repeater Books, 2016.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, Nov. 2010, firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.

Wright, Frederick A. “The Short Story Just Got Shorter: Hemingway, Narrative, and the Six-Word Urban Legend.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 2, 2014, pp. 327–340., doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2012.00935.x.

Non-Scholarly Source https://www.racked.com/2017/3/26/15001088/parent-loved-one-grief-inherited-clothing

Image Links:

Barbara Hammer:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi46eCO-ZjhAhXtdd8KHVFVATwQjxx6BAgBEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.interviewmagazine.com%2Fart%2Fartists-at-work-barbara-hammer&psig=AOvVaw2Tupj-kzjbe1bhOLXgDsqj&ust=1553453915973589

Joan Whyte: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mink_coat,_DDR,_1954.jpg

Veronica Sgroi:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/534701406/1930s-corduroy-business-suit?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-1-38

Carolee Schneemann:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/479124495/50s-dress-red-shirtwaist-elegant?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-2-16

Elizabeth Short:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/479124495/50s-dress-red-shirtwaist-elegant?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-2-16

David Caradine:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=David+Carradine

Taura: Photo courtesy of Maura Tangum’s iphone

Ted Bundy:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-24-mn-1075-story.html

Luke Perry:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi-5KnR-ZjhAhWQm-AKHbNuDsUQjxx6BAgBEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F77124212339577158%2F&psig=AOvVaw18retbDsENVIFSuorG_ecj&ust=1553454093085321

Lizette Eckert:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-she-wanted-was-to-be-a-mom-adoptive-parents-lizette-and-james-eckert-allegedly-murdered-by-11-year-old

Frank Cali:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/14/us/gambino-crime-family-member-killed/index.html

https://www.foxnews.com/us/man-accused-of-killing-gambino-mob-boss-frank-cali-formally-charged-in-new-york

Karina Vetrano:

https://nypost.com/2019/03/20/slain-joggers-smile-was-perfect-dad-says-in-emotional-testimony/

https://abc7ny.com/karina-vetrano-murder-jury-seated-in-chanel-lewis-retrial/5195092/

John Capparelli: https://nypost.com/2019/03/12/ex-priest-accused-of-sex-abuse-found-shot-dead-in-home/

Kate Spade:

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/jun/06/kate-spade-obituary

Project

Artist Statement

Album Review

Project link

Among the two approaches to the Haunted Media Project, I mainly take the one that cyber-space is a place for grieving. Instead of focusing on the grievers, I am more interested in the presentation of the deceased on his/her memorial site. In order to achieve this objective, I build a Facebook memorial page for, not a real person, but a dead fictional character from a comic book. My aim is to show that how the deceased is like a fictional character who has no agency. When he becomes only an online profile showing multiple personalities after he is dead, his RIP page is for the living friends, family, and even strangers to express their one-sided feeling, but not for the dead himself.

Multi-identities of the deceased

My project is mainly inspired by the Computer Science study conducted by Jed Brubaker, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning”. In the article, they suggest that friends and family have to face “multiple and conflicting narratives of the deceased” and social media may amplify the challenge of achieving consensus among these complicated identities (2013, 153). Since social networking sites, such as Facebook, allow isolated acquaintances of the dead to mourn, they become a “techno-spiritual spaces in which the identities of the deceased are inter-subjectively produced by the contributions of SNS friends” (154). In order to re-create this multi-identity conflict, I intentionally choose a protagonist who appears as various characters in different short stories in the comic series for my fictional RIP page. Sapphire, “the deceased” on my memorial page, is one of the main characters in a Chinese comic Beryl and Sapphire. (See book cover below. Sapphire is the blue one, as you can recognize him by his name).

The comic series is constituted by diverse short stories which usually have no narrative connection between each other. In each story, Sapphire will take a different role, such as a knight, actor, computer programmer, scientist or even a supernatural creature, although his appearance remains the same (Yes, he is presented in a stick figure in the comic, but he also has a “human” appearance in the illustrations and the adapted Anime. I will talk about the use of this more in the later paragraph). For the sake of a distinct and clear demonstration of the multiple identities of the deceased, I pick the two most disparate, if not contrasting, characters Sapphire takes in two short stories– a brave knight who dedicated his life to defeat the Evil King and a mad scientist who kills everyone who tries to stop his inhumane experiment. In the memorial page, “his acquaintances” (all created by me with different accounts) post pictures of the knight-Sapphire and the scientist-Sapphire and argue which one is his “true” identity. As you may notice, the knight-Sapphire and the scientist-Sapphire share the same figure – a blue stick man or a young man with blue hair, with only some small differences of his clothes (the knight wears a cape and then an armor; the scientist wears a laboratory coat). Consequently, I hope that this display of two distant characters can serve as a dramatic analogy for the complex but isolated narratives the deceased possesses which is “not possible to arrive at a singular identity” (154).

<–Knight-Sapphire

Scientist-Sapphire–>

<–Survivors arguing the identities of Sapphire

Comprehensive image built by collective memory

When the survivors post various memories (pictures) of the deceased, the deceased’s image will become more comprehensive and well-rounded. In order to do this, I take the advantage of the diverse forms of Sapphire’s figure (a stick man and a natural human form) in the comic, illustrations and the adapted Anime.

Left: the comic VS Right: the Anime

As you see in the RIP page, the figure of Sapphire gradually evolves from a stick figure, which only gives the most basic and vaguest form of a human, to a black-and-white sketch, to a chibi form (“a smaller form of an existing character, meant to look cute. Usually has irregular proportions, with a big head and tiny limbs” (Wikipedia)), and eventually becomes a “real” man in the Anime.

stick figure black-and-white sketch “Chibi” Anime

Building around this idea, suggested by a classmate in the MVP session, I also update the profile picture of the RIP page regularly according to the new pictures uploaded in the visitor posts.

With the choice of the platform, I aim at demonstrating that the Facebook memorial page is “a vehicle for reconstructing, rehabilitating, and maintaining a postmodern identity in collective memory” (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154). In order words, because the Facebook memorial page is a place for distant survivors to present different sides of the deceased’s characters, the deceased’s image shown on the page will eventually become more complete than in a traditional family album that only shows his character in a singular environment.

Authenticity in online grieving

Nevertheless, does all the pictures of the deceased posted on his memorial page accurately show his identities? In the past, as culture critics Susan Sontag claims, “photographs furnish evidence” (1971, 5). However, as we discussed in class, in the digital age where editing and taking a picture out of context is only a piece of cake, photographs may have lost its function of proving ones’ personalities and justifying his actions. This problem may be especially serious when the person in the pictures is dead thus being unable to explain himself. When I am choosing the “photos of Sapphire” to upload in the visitor posts, I deliberately crop them so that the picture’s quality may be lower and there will be just a few Chinese characters or a part of another person left in the frame, but the English-speaking audiences will not be able to understand what they mean or what is happening in the narrative. By doing so, I intend to arouse the issue of online authenticity in my project.

<–What does this Chinese character say?

<–What are they saying in the speech bubbles? Does the survivor really tell the truth about the character?

Moreover, I do not give any background information of Sapphire or the story of the comic to imitate the experience of a stranger coming across this page who does not know the deceased. Inspired by the troll research by online culture scholar Whitney Phillips and the advice from my friend Abby Chan, I make a stranger’s RIP post with a happy background full of birthday cakes to question the sincerity of the “grief tourist”, a stranger whose condolence is possibly a “pathological need for attention” according to some RIP trolls (2011).

<–Grief with birthday cake background. Huh.

While grief tourist is only a special case of random grievers, in general, for a stranger all he can know about the deceased is from the posts written by the friends and family. Yet, as I argued before, the distant impressions about the dead held by different survivors make it difficult for an outsider, or even acquittances, to establish a “true identity” of the deceased when he is no longer here to tell the truth. Therefore, for the strangers and grievers, the deceased may become a nearly “fictional character” who does not have his own voice in HIS memorial page.

Deceased in the memorial page: “What am I?”

Memorial page is self-conflicting. It is established in the name of dedicating to the deceased, but at the same time, it is solely FOR the livings so that it only “symbolically belong[s] to the dead (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154).” To the strangers and grief tourists, the profile of an unknown deceased person is similar to a fictional character who is not real but only seen on screen. In some cases described in Phillips’ research, grief tourists may even respond to fake profiles created by RIP trolls (2011). My Haunt Media Project resonates with this irony and the blurring between fiction and reality by presenting a memorial page literally for a fictional character. On the other hand, for the survivors of the deceased, as we discussed in class, posting grieving comments is a one-sided action since the dead cannot respond. Ironically, I find this relationship between the survivors and the deceased in the RIP page is similar to the “one-sided” “parasocial interaction” audiences have with a fictional character in a television show whom, explained by media psychologist Karen Dill-Shackleford, they feel emotionally attached to although they understand that the character is not real and unable to respond (2015, 77). In other words, the survivors’ one-sided grieving posts to the dead’s memorial page can be understood as a self-satisfactory parasocial interaction with a fictional character. While the existence of a fictional character, argued by some philosophers, is “an artifact” or “an object” but not a human being (Thomasson 1999, 10), the deceased in the memorial page, or say the page itself, can be regarded as a fictional object without agency. This is why in my project, the page itself does not interact with any of the “visitors”, not even like any of the posts, but only changes its profile picture (its image) according to the survivors’ impressions. Sapphire, or say the page, never explain his contradictory identities held in the survivors’ minds because he/it has no control over the page. The way we construct an image of a real person by their words and actions online, as psychologist Nick Chater indicates, is no different with knowing a fictional character by their dialogues and actions in a novel (2018). For both a deceased and a fictional character, there exists no “true… [and] definitive interpretation” (Chater 2018), hence the survivors’ grieving and interacting with others on the RIP page is an act of not only “reconstructing… a postmodern identity” (Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, 154), but creating and affirming our personal belief to the deceased’s identity. However, the true identity of the deceased can never be recovered by the online memorial page.

The analogy between a fictional character and the online memorial page of a deceased is the reason that, although the profile picture of Sapphire in my page evolves continuously and dramatically from a vague stick-figure to a more human-like, concrete and completed image, it eventually stops at the Anime version. It will never transform into a real person (there are cosplayers play this character, but I do not include those pictures for this narrative purpose) and exceed the boundary of fantasy and reality. In the end, despite being a platform for postmodern mourning, the RIP page may not be a true presentation of the deceased. Even if the memorial page really has an identity (this is where my project shift a little bit to the approach of messages from the dead with the last post by “Sapphire”), would it really be the deceased we know of?

Work cited:

Brubaker, Jed R, Gillian R Hayes, and Paul Dourish. 2013. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook As a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29 (3): 152–63. doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.

Chater, Nick. “My Life as a Fictional Character.” Psychology Today, November 03, 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mind-is-flat/201811/my-life-fictional-character

“Chibi” In Wikipedia. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_(slang)

Dill-Shackleford, Karen, Cynthia Vinney, Jerri Lynn Hogg, and Kristin Hopper-Losenicky. 2015. Mad Men Unzipped: Fans on Sex, Love, and the Sixties on Tv. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/book/42096.

Ocarina. Beryl and Sapphire. https://ac.qq.com/Comic/comicInfo/id/536332.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16, no.12 (2011). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.

Sontag, Susan. 1977. “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pages 3-24.

Thomasson, Amie L. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Grant Pecheck

DIG 215: Death in the Digital Age

Haunted Media Project Artist Statement

One of my earliest friends at Davidson College actually was not actually a Davidson student, although I did not learn that until after the third or fourth time I met him. His name was Patrick Braxton-Andrew and from the very first day, I knew him as “Uncle Pat.” Uncle Pat was a Davidson College alumnus who ran for the cross-country team during his time as a Davidson student. Along with being a freakishly fast and fit person, Uncle Pat was also a phenomenal soccer player and being an avid soccer player myself, it was unsurprising that we met one another at a Davidson Men’s Club Soccer practice.

Over the three years I knew Uncle Pat, I grew to be great friends with him. I would see him at Club Soccer, on runs around campus, and would regularly have a beer with him at Brickhouse Tavern on Thursday nights. Uncle Pat was one of the most industrious, friendly, and motivated people I knew. He ran his own tutoring company, PBA Ventures, in which he facilitated tutoring opportunities for Davidson College students to work with local high school students in the area. I asked Pat if he enjoyed his company and line of work and he told me he was proud of himself for starting a successful business. When I asked him how the money was, he laughed and said “I’m living the dream, man. I run this company and it gives me enough money to be able to travel two or three months out of the year.” Besides being a great friend and athlete, Uncle Pat was an adventurer to his core and loved to visit South America and Asia, using the money from his company to self-finance cheap but incredible trips around the world.

When I saw that first Facebook post on October 31, 2018, that Uncle Pat had gone missing while traveling in Mexico, my heart sunk. I told my roommate who is from Mexico what had happened and where Pat went missing and he said that the area was not a good place to disappear, causing my concerns to only escalate. Things only got worse over the days as little information turned up and there were few leads on Pat’s disappearance. Then, just as I had learned that Pat had gone missing via Facebook, I saw another Facebook post and was devastated to learn that he had been killed in Mexico, about ten days after he first disappeared.

While I had a community of people on campus who all knew Pat and with whom I could grieve, I saw the entire experience of learning about Pat’s disappearance and death via Facebook play out before my eyes and watched as people grieved and sent support to Pat’s family via the Facebook page “Missing/Desaparecido – Patrick Braxton-Andrew.” When we were assigned this project to create a digital artifact having to do with death, I decided I would create a Facebook page to recognize Pat’s life and share some stories of him. In doing so, I was able to “digitally participate” in the death and subsequent celebration of Pat’s life, a phenomenon described in the article we read in class, Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning. The authors in the article describe how Facebook allows people to learn of a friend or acquaintance’s death from afar and still participate in the grieving process and celebration of life, despite being physically distanced from the deceased. When the Davidson community held an event in recognition of Pat’s life, I was unable to attend because I was back home in Los Angeles for a wedding at the time. Instead, through Facebook, I was able to do my own personal celebration of Patrick’s life and share some of the ways he impacted me and those around me, despite not being temporally or physically near him.

In designing a Facebook memorial for Patrick, I had a number of practical decisions to make. The first was whether or not I wanted to make this page public, private, or hidden. I decided that I would make the group private, such that any person would be able to search for the group and request to join it but I would control any content as a moderator. I was not sure if I wanted to publicize the page and invite a bunch of friends to it or just have one or two friends join. Since Facebook mandated that I add at least one person to the group, I added a couple of my roommates but chose not to publicize the page beyond that. Unlike many public Facebook memorial pages, I wanted this to be a more private affair, something akin to a “finsta,” or private account that many people use to publish more personal and less curated content on Instagram to a smaller subset of their friends and followers.

Another important decision I had to make when creating this page was whether or not to use Patrick’s real and full name. I decided to use an alias instead of using his full name of Patrick Braxton-Andrew for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was not sure how his family or friends would respond if they searched for any memorial pages for Patrick on Facebook and found the one I created. I was not able to find any information one way or the other about the family’s wishes for there to be a specific memorial page to share stories about Pat so I decided to err on the side of caution and not name the page after Patrick specifically. Instead, I used a random name generator online to create a male, caucasian name with a hyphenated last name. The ensuing result was “Brady Virgil-Phillips” so I named the Facebook group “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips.” Beyond any concerns about Pat’s family or friends not responding well to this page, I also recognized the potential threat of online grief trolls, a phenomenon we studied closely when we read LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. In the article, Whitney Phillips interviewed a number of trolls, including “Paulie Socash.” Towards the end of the article, Paulie said that one of the best ways to stop and root out grief trolls is by making Facebook pages private so that administrators can moderate content and group participation on the page. As such, while I had already created the group under an alias for Patrick, I decided that making the page private would also help me insulate against the possibility of any random grief troll trying to post vitriolic comments and undermine my memorial to Patrick’s life.

While we discussed in class the very public nature of grieving on social media and the ways in which people will memorialize and share stories about the deceased in digitally public groups designed for that specific purpose, I decided to go in a slightly different direction with my Facebook group to celebrate the life of Patrick. As I said earlier, I made the group private, which meant that anyone could search for and see the group and anyone who specifically joined could see what I had posted in the group. However, after reading Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn, I decided that I wanted my celebration of Patrick’s life to be of a more private nature and chose to treat this Facebook group as almost a digital diary in which I could reflect on my memories of Patrick. In the conclusion of Logging On and Letting Out, Carroll and Landry talk about how social media sites serve “both private and communal purposes in the grieving process, and that as an aggregate they can form an important narrative of and for a person’s life and legacy as a type of memory.” This captures the essence of what I wanted from “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips:” a private use of social media as a digital archive in which I could share the interactions I had with Patrick and the things I knew to be true about him as a way to construct his legacy in my mind. I could add people to the group and share my stories and memories of him if I wanted but for the most part, my goal was to digitally archive and celebrate Patrick in a private manner. In doing so, I chose to spend about a week filling out the page with personal stories, photos, and memories of Patrick. All of these entries celebrated the quintessential elements of Patrick’s personality such as his kind-natured soul, his love of travel, and his incredible athleticism.

In reflecting on the experience, I found the process of digitally memorializing Patrick to be cathartic and generally uplifting. Given that Patrick passed five months ago, I have come to terms with his passing, so this exercise was not so much a way for me to grieve as it was a fond remembrance of Patrick and a celebration of all the wonderful things he brought to my life and the lives of those who knew him. I consider Patrick to be one of the best people I ever had the pleasure of knowing and this project was a way for me to cement my understanding of Pat as a community-oriented and caring role model that all of us could look up to. As a result of learning about the remarkably varied uses of social media to help us grieve or celebrate the lives of those who pass on, I found that my project, a mostly private and personalized memorial to Patrick, proved to be a touching way to remember the life of one of the best people I ever knew at Davidson.

Link to the page “In Memory of Brady Virgil-Phillips”
The page’s privacy settings are private so request access and I will approve the request to join ASAP. The reasons for making the page private are explained above in the artist statement.

Works Cited:

Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. 2013. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” Information Society 29 (3): 152–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.

Carroll, Brian, and Katie Landry. 2010. “Logging On and Letting Out: Using Online Social Networks to Grieve and to Mourn.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30 (5): 341–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610380006.

Phillips, Whitney. 2011. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday 16 (12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i12.3168.