Collective Narrative Week 1: Response to American Folk Art Museum visit

The “Securing the Shadow” exhibition at the Folk Art museum traces the ways in which the deceased were memorialized throughout American history. Techniques explored in the exhibition include painting, photography, and tombstone engravings. I appreciated the long historical notes dispersed throughout the exhibition; it was striking to learn, for instance, that the practice of photographing the dead was not only common at some point, but that there even existed guidelines for how to properly photograph them.

Coming out of the exhibition I wondered about emergent practices of memoralization enabled by modern technology. For instance, Facebook pages where family and acquaintances of a recently deceased person can share memories of them have become ubiquitous; so much so that Facebook has even created a specific type of account for that usage.

The Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" explores a future where we can simulate the dead, and its implications.

That’s only the beginning, of course; we’re probably not far away from a future where we will be able to create a high-resolution model of someone’s body and mind. That model can then live forever digitally, or even be given an exoskeleton and brought back to the physical world. How are we going to use those technologies remains to be seen.