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Virtual_Death_Memorials
| Virtual Death Memorials
On March 27, 2005 at the Big Easy’s charmingly bizarre
Barrister’s Gallery, artists will experience what afterlife will
be in a virtual death memorial group show – Hydriotaphia: New
Orleans Artists Design Their Own Funeral Urns. Barrister’s
Gallery owner, Andy Antippas will act as curator with artist,
Dan Teague. To spice up the show and heighten enthusiasm for it,
Antippas declared, “What are memorials to the dead but
touchstones for the great post-mortem popularity contest? He
whose gravestone draws the biggest crowds wins”
Digital artist, David Sullivan plays off the self-esteem type of
virtual death memorial by coming up with his Ego Machine. In
order to put the fun back into the funeral, this project of
Sullivan uses Google, as protector of his soul into the future.
His concept for the Ego Machine was that the vanity of death
memorials levels off with the use of the internet like a vanity
mirror. He had also emphasized today’s geeky technological
interests – robots, artificial intelligence, DNA replication and
cloning – that somehow are manic on immortality.
The Ego Machine has an urn for Sullivan that was visually
interesting, gives chance for user involvement and allows
citation of his physical body. His remains will be integrated in
a computer processor. As a memorial, a virtual agent shall run
on the computer containing his ashes and scour the web for
mentions of his name. Once mention of his name increases across
the web, an image of Sullivan’s younger self will morph
on-screen. However, once mention decreases, his on-screen image
will age, diminish and ultimately fade away.
The program that powers Ego Machine was authored in Macromedia
Director. The program uses a web-spider that goes through the
web gathering and indexing specific information automatically,
the data being mentions of Sullivan’s name. The data found,
containing the originating web address, context and date, where
Sullivan’s name was mentioned will be logged into a mySQL
database. The Director program then accesses the gathered data
through a plug-in called xMySQL.
The Ego Machine’s prototype will be presented in the virtual
death memorial gallery. He’s to encourage visitors to link into
his website, discuss him on their blogs or visit the Ego
Machine’s beta version and manipulate his store of after-life
points. Meanwhile, the gallery visitors will be given a chance
to interact directly with its non-beta version. Other graphic
design artists also created pieces for the show. An urn that
holds the remains of Roy Ferdinand, an artist who lost his
battle with cancer on Dec. 3, 2004, will also be shown. Two
artists are commissioned by Antippas to create Ferdinand’s urn
that displays some of the things he treasured and his artworks,
after Ferdinand’s sister handed over Ferdinand’s ashes to
Antippas.
The show simply showed that even as we are practically mortals
and all, not entirely permanent in this world – technological
advances may help in making us virtually immortal. -30-
About the author:
Lala C. Ballatan is a 26 year-old Communication Arts graduate.
Book reading has always been her greatest passion -- mysteries,
horrors, psycho-thrillers, historical documentaries and
classics.
Her writing prowess began as early as she was 10 years old in
girlish diaries. With writing, she felt freedom – to express her
viewpoints and assert it, to bring out all concerns -- imagined
and observed, to bear witness.
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