K13010 - Soul B[u]oy;

 

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”[Baudrillard 1983]

 

In a time of increasingly empty signifiers, it seems incongruous that we find ourselves following the same funerary processes that would have been familiar to our ancient ancestors, erecting monuments to the departed and honouring them with public displays of grief and anguish. Yet this is only one manifestation of our grief, a physical gesture of remembrance for one not truly gone. More fascinating still is the ever more public act of digital mourning, an event which continues to take place for years after the departure of the loved one.  

This work explores new paradigms for the cemetery in an age of simulation, seeking to develop a new paradigm for an authentic experience of mourning.

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"CONceptulaised as a cognisance machine, speculative, (mis)understood as a repository for those social media profiles where mourning has reached a state of entropy; remembered only as the result of memory prompts rather than genuine emotion. Meaning has been lost, but Soul B[u]oy watches over the immortal data, an archive and guardian, a machine of loving grace." 

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