Shrine File is a corrupted collection of data that dictates passage of the self. When your physical form fails, where is the self enshrined?
The file visually imagines the digital intersection of sacred and profane: 360 videos of ancient tombs and chapels are layered with everyday masses of human flesh alongside suggestions of an infinitely folding universe. Tombstones branded with digital codes melt into a physical human hive. The file exists between the moment of life and death. The moment the self can be digitally enshrined before dissipating. It exists between the individual self and the collective human cloud.
Emile Durkheim wrote that “religious and profane life cannot coexist in the same space…religious and profane life cannot coexist in the same time.” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Man is not sacred: he creates this through ritual and belief. The ritual sets the sacred apart from everyday life. The afterlife wisps beyond our everyday grasp, but with the digital shrine we draw it closer. Our afterlife becomes a “tangible” set of digital artifacts — how do we populate them, position them, secure them, maintain them?
The digital shrine becomes the totem laden sarcophagus. We spend the lifetime preparing the Shrine File so that we can die immortal.
“A coded human existence is one without the singularity of the liberal subject. Instead of a multiplicity of singular wills or a cacophony of different spirits and personalities, subjects are transcribed into codes operating via variations of ones and zeroes.” (Anna Piepmeyer). Choose ENCODED: the file imagines such a human code. Individuality is transformed at the moment of physical death: from the gravestone emerges a collective force, a glitched soul enmasse. “We are now on the threshold of a new mutation.” (Slavoj Zizek).
Is the coded mutation/the hive/the noosphere simply a colossal collective of the everyday profane? Or does it elevate into the realm of gods? For Durkheim, sacred cannot exist unless differentiated against profane. The binary is necessary to construct separate sacredness. The glitched, grubby digital is a profane shell, unreliable and easily broken. The collective hive, jacking the code as a ground, remains sacred.
Choose TEMPLE: “Join us,” screams the chorus as they whirl through ancient sacred grounds. Can you know a sacred god or the devil through these secular, digital bits? Instead of a physical site, we embed the mementos of self here, in these holy reconstructions. Navigate your keystrokes to mourn, to memorialize, to pray.
This project arose out of the integration of digital death into everyday life. For centuries, death was aesthetically understood as a “natural part of life,” where physical grave sites “connected [living communities] with the death and [gave] a sense of unity with nature even in the face of the chaos of death.” (Graham, 38).
The “back to nature” — through land or water burial or burning — death process was ritualistically separated from the fabric of everyday life.
Spending time in online space is an everyday part of life; so can something like Facebook Memorial walls ever cultivate a sense of sacredness amongst the profane streams of daily chatter? When presented with so much content, whether kids taking selfies at a funeral or heartfelt condolences posted online, can any of it be sacred if none of it can be separated from the profane?
Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish examined Facebook as a site for death and mourning. They note how “features like the Newsfeed often continue to inject death into otherwise typical Facebook use.” (157). Interview subjects varied between feeling like Facebook was cold and impersonal and feeling like it was a productive way to “make readers feel a little more at ease about the death.” (156).
Graham et al. addressed a digital memorialization page called HeavenAddress in their exploration of physical and digital grave sites. Unlike Facebook, HeavenAddress is specifically made for remembering the dead. But it still reeks of normative social media qualities — people can like and share the obituary pages, tap “love u/miss u/thank u” buttons, and leave digital candles and flowers. In the most contrived move, users can also vote on words to create a word cloud inspired by the deceased.
Brubaker et al. would characterize something like HeavenAddress as a feature of postmodern death: the boundary between public and private mourning is eroded, and many of the publicly expressed feelings are expressions of individualism, not collectivism. The social sharing and writing is oriented around digitally performing for the living.
Online bereavement provides immediate connection across physical boundaries and social groups, which Brubaker et al. call temporal, spatial, and social expansion. Because of this convenience of connection, death will never go offline. But how we choose to approach death online should be a matter of concern.
For Durkheim, the distinctions a society chooses to make between sacred and profane is the basis for truth and collective memory of the society. Sacred rituals produce “continuity over generations,” and in this way, “societies become conscious of themselves and their history.” (Coleman, 67).
If digital forms of death content are to provide a sacred space and collective memory, then they must become ritualized and separate from typical forms of online content. Already, online users can access 360 view videos of temples, chapels, and ancient religious ruins; I can imagine a world where accessing simulations of sacred sites become part of the digital death ritual.
On the flip side of imagining this sort of ritualized online visit to the TEMPLE is the process of being ENCODED; to ritualistically shed the cult of individuality and tap into the collective. Perhaps this is the point where instead of using the remnants of a digital self to remember and memorialize an individual (and to leverage mourning as a way to express the individual self), the content is passed into the collective memory. “Detected/in-loading/load” text on the ENCODED video generally suggests a sort of information gathering, akin to Facebook, but the uploading process is without individual imagery.
The two videos are halves of an imaginary file, corrupted by age and outdated technology. It is a capsule of futuristic digital death rituals discovered even further in the future. The audio tracks are suggestive of myth, mystery, and secrecy — one, a rock song that when played backwards allegedly contains Satantic messages (this, out of 80/90ies heydey of deliberate backmasking that became so dramatic that California passed a bill banning backmasking that “can manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist”). The second is a non-verbal synthed chant layered and repeated to provoke a feeling of otherworldly, unbounded encounters.
For the digital world to become a more significant meaning container for death, we have to be deliberate about separating our death rituals from the everyday flow. Postmodernism dictates that these boundaries between sacred and profane will erode and collapse; but when that happens, our collective consciousness becomes flimsy and our collective memory myopic. Ritualizing death as sacred, even in online space, reminds us of our mortality while simultaneously creating a collective consciousness that transcends the individual.
Works Cited:
Brubaker, Jed R., Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29.3 (2013): 152-63. Web.
Coleman, Elizabeth Burns, and Kevin White. “Stretching the Sacred.” Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society. Canberra, A.C.T.: ANU E, 2006. 65-78. Print.
Graham, Connor, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin Gibbs. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies 30.1 (2015): 37-53. Taylor and Francis Online. Visual Studies. Web.
