Workshop »Digital Afterlife and the Posthuman«

1.

Rites of passage which contain dying and death or dissolve what Freud has called „the ambivalence of feelings toward the dead“, have been investigated by anthropologists for ages. However, it is only quite recently that we pay attention to the long farewell in the Internet – although the first virtual tomb stone was already set in 1993. Research on digital mourning quite often has to deal with the virtuality of survival, with accounts and footprints left in the Social Networks which can hardly be cancelled (Sisto 2018). The entire space of the Social networks seems to abound from ghosts and spirits, similar to the one which is increasingly occupied by Artificial Intelligence: by Chatbots for instance which are equipped with memoirs, argumentation strategies and even the voice of the person who in lifetime has decided to talk to us from beyond the grave (Mason-Robbie & Savin Baden 2020). It is at this very point that the questions of “virtual death” and of the Posthuman intersect (Stokes 2021).

2.

The intention of our workshop in Siegen is thus twofold: we want to know which are occurring forms of mourning, of Farewell in the WWW, which media make them, how do these media artefacts enter the virtual space, what is their effect in the offline-world, and which are the social groups one could consider as the avantgarde of “virtual mourning”? Furthermore, we would like to ask what follows from these practices for the conception of the human itself. The extensions of the Self in space and time, its multiple ways to instantiate itself and the possibility of merging with (virtual) others could also open up spaces to re-think the divide between Westerners and ‘indigeneous’ people and it could help to  reconceptualize ideas of personhood ascribed to the cultural other in the past (analogous to Marcel Mauss’ classical reconstruction of “personhood”, 1938).

3.

The first section of the workshop shall be dedicated to projects in the realm of (secular) mourning and grieving, to practices of digital commemoration, the circulation of images etc. The second part should deal with the digital practices of Farewell, with funeral rituals and the Internet, or with digital heritage. The third section will rather raise treat conceptual questions as mentioned above.

Participants

Thiemo Breyer, philosopher, phenomenologist, Cologne

Anja Dreschke, Filmmaker, photographer and anthropologist, Siegen

Anu A. Harju, Social sciences, PI of the research group: “Digital Death”, Helsinki

Miranda Hutton, photographer and anthropologist

Ulrich van Loyen, Media Studies, Siegen

Maya Mablin, anthropologist and researcher in the field of Global Christianity, Edinburgh

Thomas Macho, philosopher, Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna

Johannes Schick, philosopher, with special expertise in the field of philosophy of technology

Maria Serafini, philosopher, Milano

Johanna M. Sumiala, media studies, principal investigator of the Research Group: “Digital Death: Transforming history, rituals, and afterlife” (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/digital-death-transforming-history-rituals-and-afterlife/people)  Helsinki