For millennia death has been celebrated in multiple ways and forms, defining funeral practices as the most central of all rites. Mortality does not seem to affect us until we are suddenly touched by it directly. Memento mori, in Latin 'remember you must die', is not a gloomy reminder of our human destiny, but to invigorate life. This book is an offering, as well as a gentle reminder of the ephemerality of life, split between our physical, but also our digital reality.
As we live in increasingly datafied societies, in which new technologies constantly reshape relationships, lifestyles and habits, a support system that could aid the re-integration of death into everyday life is absent. How do we experience grief in a digital society? And how do we reconnect with funeral practices in a rationalist, modern reality that is void of ritual? These two questions cannot be answered separately.
DEATH DESIGN DATA investigates the experience of death and grief in the digital era - one that is saturated with information yet finds itself devoid of rituality - and how art and design could play a role in reconciling humans with death. Ten contemporary artists and designers explore how different creative practices are able to produce new rituals in relation with death and loss and how this affects us as humans. The experiences, memories and invocations shared on these pages invite us to reconsider our mortality, and the vessels that we use to navigate life and death.