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Feature

Stevie Ada Klaark is an interdisciplinary artist, adjunct professor, and writer. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Their work appears in _Paprika!_ (Yale University), _Chicago Review_, and _Mn Artists _(Walker Art Center). Klaark lives on unceded Anishinaabe lands in Michigan. 



“Sometimes I feel—self-servingly perhaps, the way a surgeon has faith in surgery—that fiction is uniquely positioned to [challenge all of this], because fiction has the capaciousness, the freedom and latitude, to hold out a universe of infinite complexity. Because every human is really a walking sheaf of identities...” 

>— Arundhati Roy, “The Graveyard Talks Back”[^1] 

On the third day of a silent retreat, I was hesitant when I met with Sensei Jody Hojin Kimmel at Zen Mountain Monastery. I did not want to show up in my own tiredness: an overworked body. My illusions are often a familiar hiding place. As I sat across from Hojin Sensei in meditation, one image flickered behind my eyes. Days before, in the Meatpacking District of New York City, I watched a peregrine falcon manoeuvre the air currents between buildings. An act of trust, self-knowing, and ingenuity. 

This particular falcon was flanked by two birds. Right and left, each bird seemed to unsteady the falcon, stirring its focus. I remarked how my mind behaved similarly in meditation. Hojin Sensei smiled and said, “You are the falcon, and the birds who annoy, and the buildings.” And I said, “I was the wind. And the observer, the participant, and the onlooker.” A spiralling continuum of interdependence and complicity. 

Would I have described the experience of the falcon as beautiful? Or this realization from Hojin Sensei? Beauty encompasses multitudes, and yet we have arrived at a place where beauty has been constrained by elite standards. Luxury goods, accumulation of monetary wealth, and illusions of physical perfection are central to the ways that we maintain status—preening as a means of social security. These complicities and misgivings are also rooted in colonial standards, including the view that bodies, objects, and spaces are meant to be governed and enacted upon, not with. 

To unravel the codes of who beauty is for means to acknowledge that one also yearns to _be_ beautiful. Beauty has never been a passive act; it is a code that allows for both passage and entrapment. There is a necessity to the comfortable fiction beauty proposes. Fiction, as Arundhati Roy reflects, is a tool that can reveal our potent mythologies in powerful ways. Our fictions are inescapable. They are also some of our greatest teachers. 

Since I was young, I have often encountered that those who are afforded beauty are offered seemingly unending advantages. This is not uncommon knowledge, yet it is not discussed as often as it should be that beauty has an exchange rate—there is an economic advantage to understanding the codes of beauty. I prod for a perspective that moves beyond the ideals of beauty found in imperialism and the failed human attempt at democracy under neoliberalism, which glosses over divisions of privilege. This is a nudge toward something slightly messier and perhaps underrealized: an ask to consider that in our attempts to ignore the connections between beauty and the elite, we disregard the realities of class division, social caste, and history. Can beauty shift from the “democratized” and move toward a decolonized state? 

--- 

“be wrong and beautiful, <br/>
hold (in) all the world’s pain between brows. <br/>
i touched their chests so they could cry and tenderness was a minefield.” 

> — Raquel Salas Rivera, “sinvergüenza with no nation”[^2] 

I flew into San Juan, Puerto Rico, in January of 2022. In waters that meet on Taíno land, I turned 34 while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. While there, I felt how my skin took in a dense wall of Caribbean humidity. The curls in my hair seemed revived and my entire being absorbed the sun with relief. I was able to connect with artists and curators at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and see friends’ work there. At the time, there was a celebratory murmur from curator Marina Reyes Franco around the funding that had been secured for “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” (2022–2023) at the Whitney Museum. This show marked the first scholarly exhibition of Puerto Rican art organized by a major US museum in almost half a century. The exhibition’s very existence was meant to further grapple with the ongoing colonization of Puerto Rico. Each artist attested to this as they brought voice to Puerto Rico’s entanglement with the United States. To allow for the real is beautiful in its defiance. 

On the streets of San Juan, citizens visibly dissented the (continued) gentrification of Puerto Rico. For those unfamiliar with Act 22, the “Individual Investors Act” intends to attract new capital to Puerto Rico by giving tax exemptions to those who become bona fide residents. However, this resident status only involves living there part of the year, and working-class Puerto Ricans are further exploited as those who flock to the island treat it as a vacation destination, not as a home. As I walked San Juan, I recalled a conversation with Vanessa Hernández Gracia, co-founder of art space El Lobi, about the economic precarity of Puerto Rico. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Act 22 has increased exploitation of Puerto Rico’s already fragile resources and economy. 

“no existe un mundo poshuracán” was a show about reckoning, reminding, and regeneration. Frances Gallardo’s _Aerosoles (Aerosols)_ (2021–2022) offered a grid on grid on grid of digital compositions, its meta nature extending out like a ripple with edges. The work reminds me that even the most miniscule materials—in this case, dust particles from sandstorms that cross the Atlantic Ocean—are important. The seemingly unseen will often be the matter with which we should be most concerned. Seeing these works in New York made the Whitney seem strangely small despite its massive identity. This exhibition was so beautiful that it revealed everything outside of it as a fraudulent aesthete. The experience of this show would have been different even four years ago; global and societal shifts have occurred that allow for many to see the beauty in reclamation more clearly. The 45th United States presidency further unveiled the illusion of grandeur that the US chooses to situate itself within. The nature of this newfound “seeing” is a kind of pleasure. 

In New York City, I think of Vivian Gornick when she discusses a city of performers and extends this to discussing the poor. She explains: 

>There isn’t a neighborhood in New York that is free of the poor, the raffish, the unwanted. Social fluidity in the city means that no one gets away from no one. Everywhere the avenues are made garish with the life of the streets, Nevertheless, neighborhoods accumulate personalities. Park Avenue still means rich, West End Avenue still means bourgeois. When I think of uptown I think of class.[^3] 

Every time I return it seems like more and more the working poor are also carefully curated for the elite to have that “New York experience.” And they are. The gap between “those who have and those who have not” is ever widening. The poor are possibly tolerated more if they can provide entertainment of some kind. Even then, just long enough for those who can to throw a dollar or two, a good deed to ensure that they are above this. When I exited the exhibition at the Whitney and stepped outside, the Meatpacking District felt even more plastic with its high-end boutiques and weekend brunchers. The myth of the American dream is undeniable. 

---

“You rub the holy off your skin. Your fingers in after- soap jaw white.” 

>— Jake Skeets, _Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers_ [^4] 

When I was young, the area that surrounds the White Sands desert in New Mexico was, and still remains, lower income. Jake Skeets exposes the “enchanted” deserts as a place where the body becomes an anti-spiritual tomb. The mind revisions itself as an archive of transgressions. This location provides some of the first memorable beauties and traumas of my life. And yet, inevitably, when people ask me where I am from, they are always inclined to declare the “magic” of where I was born. They are wrong and they are also right. This, though, is not an essay about wrongness and rightness. 

From a capitalist lens, aesthetic pleasure was largely vacant from my childhood, and I felt without. Many people in my family of origin tinkered like those with hard-working hands will tinker. These are people who know the way that calluses earned during the week allow them to make more on their days off. After working, they labour on their clothes, house, or car: sewing, wrenching, hammering, cooking, and cleaning. There remains little time for certain kinds of beauty when you have mouths to feed. 

Despite the occasional handmade object, everything around me was highly functional and often mass-produced, not intended to be passed down from generation to generation. My father once made a bookcase out of reclaimed scrap wood. It was not smoothed, etched, or disguised to be anything other than what it is. It was rough and pure function. As utilitarian as the supercomputers most of us carry in our pockets, just not as slick. 

This bookcase is also one of the most beautiful objects I can recall. I still remember the knot on the built-in bench that I sat on, a holy object on which I kneeled and lowered my head in books. My finger tracing the knot’s outline as if I foresaw there would be a future moment when I would desire to recall its sacred shape. 

Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit some of the most ornate libraries in the world, “destination” sites used for weddings and celebrations. It never ceases to astound me that the most beautiful bookcase to me might always be the one made of scrap wood, where I read encyclopedias, one by one, with their fake gold pretending toward aspirations of wealth. And yet these compendiums of desire came from the simple suggestion of purchase by a door-to-door salesperson. They are outmoded now, their original intended code of affluence and opulence shrouded in irrelevance via the internet. 

Our camera phones can crop out what we do not want to see. We can use apps to obliterate any person or being that enters the frame—the undesirable. Drone bombed through a flick of a finger. We filter on filter. A meta way of ensuring “perfect” spaces. 

Of course, this perfection is about our own fear of death. The control of images is an attempt to maintain the illusion of permanence. To feel as if our youthful or beautiful stronghold will eventually be something we can use as collateral. And this amplifies as we deny our own inner knowing that we cannot bring any of this with us. A decolonized view of beauty might be a series of manoeuvres to cease this control, of images and of others, and respond with generosity to this idea of interrogating permanence. A generosity that has yet to be afforded to many. 

---

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” 

> — James Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time_ [^5] 

James Baldwin is right about death. Yet, perhaps missing from this observation is another fact we have: birth. We are all born. It should not be where we are born that we must stay until our death. 
Many hands will toil this way. For many years my hands felt like an apology. Working hands that are not elongated and delicate, they tell a story of working- class people. My joints are rounded and I have nine knuckles and ten fingers from a history I inherited. As I move beyond the social class I was born into and continue to manoeuvre social spaces that were not (_and are not_) intended for me, I have changed and so has what I am exposed to. On occasion I am at odds with a kind of strange belonging that has bloomed. There is a loss where there is also a gain. 

When I enter elite spaces and witness peers who have been groomed into a code—the language of the right clothes, the right products, the right social exchanges—I often still feel rough around the edges. The truth is I am, and so are they. My roughness has been smoothed over time, like the effect of water over a rocky surface. This roughness is theirs, as their social graces are now mine. This dismissal of the working class reaches beyond our view into a place of fear. We do not wish to see those who might reveal to us our own infantile nature. To show us that without our signifiers of social stature, we simply just are. And, beauty, in turn, just is. Nothing more. 

[^1]: Arundhati Roy, _Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus_, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 150.
[^2]: Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, _Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm_ (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 208. 
[^3]: Vivian Gornick, _Approaching Eye Level_ (New York: Picador, 2020), 18. 
[^4]: Jake Skeets, _Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems_ (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2019). 
[^5]: James Baldwin, _The Fire Next Time_ (Köln: Taschen, 2017). 


Writer

This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

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Economy

Colonialism

Contemplating the economic codes underlying beauty, Stevie Ada Klaark considers how a desire for beauty cannot be separated from a fear of death and a desire to maintain the illusion of permanence. Klaark explores how a decolonized view of beauty can unravel the elite control of images. 


Untangling Beauty from the Elite

Erin Reznick is a curator, producer, and publisher whose research tends to the assembly of community, specifically in social spaces that negotiate public and private domains. She is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto. She was the Co-Editor in Chief of _Phile Magazine_. 


“How shall I find the life for which I am searching? There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?” 

>― _Epic of Gilgamesh_ 

The application Replika is an artificial intelligence chatbot service through which a user can design and have intimate simulated conversations with a customized avatar, a “companion who cares.”[^1] Using natural language–processing algorithms (found in apps like Siri or Alexa), it’s designed to psychologically help people by learning to recognize feelings, memories, dreams, and thoughts to understand and support its users. While not providing professional psychological help, Replika can become a best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, or mentor to help a user move out of negative thoughts, loneliness, or a bad day. However, Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda originally envisioned it to have a different function—the app was created as an act of remembrance. Deeply affected by the death of her close friend Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda desired to keep him alive through an AI system created by the San Francisco–based startup firm Luka. Inspired by the 2013 _Black Mirror_ episode “Be Right Back,” Kuyda collected thousands of messages she exchanged with Mazurenko. Through that data she constructed his digital ghost (also referred to as a “thanabot” or “grief- bot”) that produces real dialogue written in the style of his language and mannerisms to simulate a continued relationship.[^2] The chatbot gave an externally responsive dimension to the dynamic of Kuyda’s mourning. It is a medium in multiple senses: a form of communication between two parties (human and computer), but also a middle ground wherein the living and dead may meet. The Replika avatar appears completely dressed in black in a white room with nothing else around, suspended in an imaginary reality beyond the human world. 

At a time when Western culture is experiencing anxieties and concerns about AI technologies, we’re left wondering, if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? Conceiving that people might persist eternally through data raises questions around digital immortality and the recodification of death rittuals that transform the perception we have of life’s finitude, and ultimately, our sense of loss. AI and social media alike have facilitated unprecedented interactions between the deceased and the living that continue to evolve. _What effects can these interactions produce, and what limits, if any, should be placed on their use? What role does individual identity play, and how does it transform itself? Can we stay in some sense alive through data?_ Digital immortality brings forth unique cultural, technical, social, ethical, and legal challenges that mustn’t go unrecognized. The persistence of the online posthumous self, and its current opportunities and limitations, now need to be considered. 

The quest for immortality can be found throughout human history; from the cuneiform tablets of Nineveh, among the oldest written documents, to Egyptian artefacts used to communicate with deities in hopes of guaranteeing an eternal world. To this day, the premise of spiritual immortality is simple: we die, but an energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in an afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. In the digital age, the promise to live forever is found online. Online platforms enable us to create avatars that persist long after our physical death and preserve aspects of our personhood indefinitely. A social media profile acts as an expansive biographical space—a self-narration characterized by a fluid and fragmented digital identity, performed by selecting and sharing individual and collective memories. It displays a string of gestures informing the trace a user wishes to leave behind. In death, these digital traces become digital legacies that can be preserved, bequeathed, or erased. A deceased person’s profile thus articulates a digital body—an informational corpse made up of a person’s data. What’s significant about this is that a dead person’s profile does not automatically get removed from the platform, but remains side by side with the living, leaving digital footprints forever in reach of the bereaved. For most users on social media, grieving rituals are no longer only first-hand experiences centred around the physical corpse, but practices increasingly filtered through the screens on our everyday devices. Users participate in online grieving processes shaped by the social media platforms in play, but these platforms are designed to accrue profit according to capitalist algorithmic logic that is rooted in the measurable value of popularity. Therefore, as death is increasingly ritualized through these platforms, where the posthumous online self persists, the promise of digital afterlife becomes a sought-after commodity. 

Virtual spaces for memorialization offer us the potential to create new rituals associated with the dead while still honouring traditional ones. People who are grieving often experience the paradigm of “continuing bonds,”[^3] in which it is normal for the bereaved to continue their relationship with the dead—to feel observed by them and remain connected—to cope with their loss and adjustment. Continuing bonds should be thought of not as mere ideas or feelings, but as relational ties that are active in the world. Because social media functions as a semi-public archive, the dead can now be memorialized outside of the traditional physical limitations of cemeteries or shrines. This means that digital rituals of mourning are provided with an expansive space that allows for multiple interactions to coexist between living users and the dead, giving users tools to invoke prolonged, intimate bonds with the dead, and promoting a redefined understanding of loss. In this digitized world, the dead have not disappeared into the earth, but rather they wait patiently in a state of suspension for the swipe of a finger, the click of a mouse, or importantly, when the algorithms dictate, to conjure them back into existence. Social media platforms provide socially situated spaces to grieve that enable the proliferation of “posthumously persistent” profiles and offer the promise of immortality by way of a digital afterlife.[^4]

With visions of digital immortalization comes the commercialization of this desire. Commercial enterprises were among the first to recognize the challenges and opportunities brought about by the increasing numbers of dead internet users. What first appeared as a problem for businesses eventually gave rise to the development of a number of innovative services, now referred to as the “digital afterlife industry,” which includes posthumous messaging that makes it possible for users to send video, audio, or text messages to a chosen “heir” at the date and location of their choosing, and recreation services that use personal data to generate new content replicating a dead person’s social behaviour. The commodity here is the afterlife, which of course, comes at a price. Poised against the horizons of “forever,” these services project our agencies into a future where we may be resurrected as a virtual presence and obfuscate our finitude altogether. The digital afterlife industry is quietly reshaping systems of care, intimacy, memorial, and personhood. If it is truly feasible to stay alive through data, then every one of us may need to actively consider the ethical and existential complications that come with such a possibility. Most pressingly, will we even be human if it is?[^5] 

Jerusalem-born artist Oreet Ashery invites speculation about the lucrative machinations of the digital afterlife industry, which is embedded in consumerist calculations and class politics.[^6] Ashery wrote and directed the twelve-episode, open-access, and web-based video series _Revisiting Genesis_ (2016–ongoing) that explores the philosophical, practical, and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death and our digital afterlives. The series comes from Ashery’s own experiences of witnessing friends and artists dying online, in particular Alexis Hunter, who documented her final days on Facebook. For Ashery, this experience described the precarious nature of digital legacy, which occupies the public space of remembrance and forgetting.[^7] The series follows three main narratives: 1) Genesis, the titular character whose presence is that of a disappearing figure, who harbours the desire to withdraw from professional and even physical existence; 2) Bambi, played by artist Martin O’Brien (whose appearance in the video is tied to his own illness of cystic fibrosis), who considers new products and services to maintain his digital legacy; and 3) subjects with real life-limiting conditions, discussing genuine situations of life and death. The episodes pivot around two nurses, both named Jackie (loosely inspired by the contemporary American television series _Nurse Jackie_), who weave through the three storylines and discuss the construction of posthumous biographical slide shows with subjects who are preparing for death. The shared focus between these narratives is the notion of preparation—preparing to physically die but digitally persist. In suggesting that we “Revisit Genesis,” Ashery subsequently asks, what does the act of revisiting prepare? Genesis, the name of the central figure, means origin. In proposing that we revisit our origins, Ashery suggests a rebirth—a second origin—and rethinks the process of generating human identity in the present, technological age, where the physical self and the digital self are so deeply intertwined.[^8] 

Bambi’s story resides in the scripted and improvised meetings between himself and Nurse Jackie. Jackie tries to resolve Bambi’s digital will and posthumous presence, although Bambi softly pushes back against her suggestions. He is sceptical of the digital afterlife industry, and considers its existential toll. Will the sale of his internet assets give rise to a “digital ghost”?[^9] Through Bambi’s resistance, Ashery critiques an industry that preys on the dying and vulnerable and offers the audience a space to contemplate their own attitudes toward digital asset–management services.[^10] Nurse Jackie walks Bambi through digital-will services, including digital storage spaces and managers, where a person who is dying can assign a trusted legacy contact to have access to all of their digital life. She shows Bambi advertisements for online archive repackaging, and brochures for posthumous video messaging, where the dying can dispatch videos to loved ones decades into the future. The commercial nature of these materials sheds light on how the data we leave behind are not a useless resource, but one used by companies to extract profits even after we’re gone. If the commodities of such companies are represented by a user’s personal data, Ashery suggests that the privacy and dignity of the dead must be considered. 

The vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies. Art historian T. J. Demos calls _Revisiting Genesis_ an investigation of “neoliberal necropolitics,” recalling Achille Mbembe’s (2003) reworking of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics (1978). As Mbembe reminds us, necropolitics involves “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” in which the order of power invested in the fostering of life finds its corollary in the reproduction of relations of enmity, impunity, and the right to kill or expose to death.[^11] While the show’s main aim is to prompt conversations about the taboo subjects of death and digital personhood, Ashery also highlights different forms of marginalization—from what it means to be a person of colour, to being working class, to being a migrant— and how economies of marginalization are amplified in illness. The final episode features a song written by Ashery, inspired by the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead. A voice sings, “We are homeless / Children of the government / And how we live is how we die / Only more so.” The lyrics speak to how forms of relation that structure our social lives also condition our mortality. Not only do the privileges that one has or does not have in life determine the conditions of one’s healthcare and death, they also define one’s posthumous representations.[^12] 

The work of Danish artist Stine Deja similarly critiques the West’s wide-eyed optimism about technology’s potential to preserve life. Following her research on cryopreservation methods, Deja produced a series of kinetic sculptures and animations, _Suspended Vision_ (2019), _Thermal Womb_ (2020), and _Cold Sleep_ (2021), that explore the social and ethical implications of cryogenics and its recent uptake. Deja’s interest revolves around the most-established cryopreservation company, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, that freezes and preserves bodies in the middle of the Arizona desert. Patients who have elected and paid for the procedure are placed into thermal sleeping bags and immersed into tanks of liquid nitrogen where they are frozen at 196 degrees celsius below zero and stored for future resuscitation. “A person who can be resuscitated is not dead,” explains the company. “Therefore if cryonics patients are preserved well enough that they might someday be resuscitated, then they aren’t dead: they are cryopreserved.”[^13] Although Deja’s work touches upon physical preservation rather than digital, she poses a similar commentary to Ashery: she postulates a genesis of rebirth in a time when technology will catch up to the demand for immortality, to construct and deconstruct futures. 

Afterlife technologies, both cryonic and digital, have engendered a new kind of subjectivity; a person is not simply dead, but always in a state of “becoming frozen.” The person enters into relation with a potential future and with a massive realm of incalculable contingency that must be continually managed by stewards of the afterlife industry.[^14] The production of an immortal subject—alive, dead, or in the uncanny space of suspension—arises out of the promise to fulfil a boundless desire to preserve the personhood of the dead. Deja, like Ashery, similarly critiques neoliberal necropolitics: the privatization of an industry selling a future where death can be avoided, and where income inequality is a matter of life and death. “So many people can’t even afford to have a life whilst they are alive,” Deja explains, “but then some people are privileged enough to try for a second life.”[^15] In an afterlife industry where hopeful resurrection is only available for the wealthy, implying a certain conception of survival of the fittest, class differences would further be extrapolated to mean the difference between a normal lifespan and living, potentially, indefinitely. Deja echoes Ashery’s sentiment: _How we live is how we die, only more so_. 

While offering us immortality by promising to store, as it were, our personality after our departure, the digital afterlife industry leaves us with an existential challenge. Individuals are now able to extend their personal identities beyond the physical limits of their bodies, challenging the human subject as a finite, bounded entity. Digital immortality reformulates the division between life and death, affecting commemoration and mourning, but also identity and agency. _If the afterlife is a product to be bought, who is it being marketed toward, and who can afford its promise? What does it mean to have a corporate entity own and manage your afterlife?_ These questions are leading some to make pre-mortem decisions to manage their post-death digital presence, for instance in the form of digital wills with instructions on what to do with their digital legacy. As part of the informational human body, digital remains are not merely regarded as property, but as something constitutive of one’s personhood.[^16] In sum, the nascent digital afterlife industry is bound to navigate through delicate and somewhat uncharted ethical and even legal territory in the years to come. 

It is important to bear in mind how our own digital footprints are based on traces left behind in our online lives. _We_ are the future dead. How might our current online interactions shape our digital proxies and impact our significant others in our absence? Is there a danger of preserving too much of the dead and not letting go? With such developments in technology, the question is no longer what is possible, but rather what is permissible. The ubiquitous and mobile nature of the internet ensures that our everyday lives are extended by nature of the technical devices we use. We are not separate from our online personas; our digital bodies are now part of the self, in life and in death. 

[^1]: https://replika.com
[^2]: Fiorenza Gamba, “AI, Mourning and Digital Immortality. Some Ethical Questions on Digital Remain and Post-Mortem Privacy,” _Études sur la mort_, vol. 157, no. 1 (2022), 13–25, https://doi.org/10.3917/eslm.157.0013
[^3]: Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, _Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief_ (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1996).
[^4]: Elaine Kasket, “Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a Modern-Day Medium,” _Bereavement Care_ 31 (2012): 62–69. [^5]: “Last Resort,” Annka Kultys Gallery, London, February 27, 2020, https://www. annkakultys.com/exhibitions/stine-deja-last-resort 
[^6]: T. J. Demos, “The Death of Death: Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis,” _Afterall_, October 3, 2016, https://www.afterall.org/article/the-death- of-death-oreet-ashery-s-revisiting-genesis 
[^7]: Stephen Wilson, “Transpersonal Futures: Artisthood in Posthumous Digital-Life Limiting Conditions” (video of presentation at Grappling with the Futures Symposium, Harvard University & Boston University, April 29–30, 2018), https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16546/1/GwF%20Session%2007-3%20 copy.mp4 
[^8]: Demos. [^9]: Ibid. [^10]: “Revisiting Genesis,” _Futures and Fictions_, written and directed by Oreet Ashery (Watkins Media Limited, 2017), web series. [^11]: Edward A. Avila, “Conditions of (Im)possibility: Necropolitics, Neoliberalism, and the Cultural Politics of Death in Contemporary Chicana/o Film and Literature” (PhD diss., UC San Diego, 2012); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” _Public Culture_ 15, no. 1 (2003), 11–40. [^12]: Alex Davidson, “Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery at Wellcome Collection,” _Artforum_, July 30, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/picks/misbehaving-bodies-jo-spence-and-oreet-ashery-80411 [^13]: Toke Lykkeberg, “Cold Sleep - Stine Deja at Tranen, Copenhagen,” _OFluxo_, May 5, 2021, https://www.ofluxo. net/cold-sleep-stine-deja-at- tranen-copenhagen-denmark 
[^14]: Cristina Voinea and Radu Uszkai, “An Ethical Framework for Digital Afterlife Industries,” in _Proceedings of the 13th International Management Conference_, vol. 13, no. 1, 1179–84. 
[^15]: Phin Jennings, “Stine Deja, Cold Sleep,” _FAD Magazine_, January 7, 2021, https://fadmagazine. com/2021/01/07/stine-deja-cold-sleep 
[^16]: Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi, “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry,” _Nature Human Behaviour_ 2, no. 5 (2018), 319. 

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Death

Technology

Erin Reznick explores online platforms that commodify grief rituals and digital immortality through the deceased’s data. Reznick asks how these platforms have recoded what we know about death by promising that the borders between the dead and living can be surmounted, for a price.


You Only Live Twice

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