postcards from the necrospace

13/7/2015 PostcardsfromtheNecrospace|dprbarcelona

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Postcards from theNecrospace

For Ester

they are in some place / a cloud or a tombthey are in some place / Im sure

Mario Benedetti

Death occurs, everywhere and everyday around us. Have you wondered how deathinfluence the spaces we inhabit? Ittransforms the way we interact with spaces formerly used by our loved ones and also unveil hidden urban layers andinfrastructure. In October 2014, a group of43 students disappeared in Mexicoin one obscure episode that the governmenthas attributed to drug gang struggles. This episode has trigger a series of protests claiming for justice, and safer anddemocratic cities. Even there is no certainty about the destiny of those students [neither of thousands of women disappearedand murdered in the region], it called our attention how this relationship with death somehow determines choreographies ofagents building up the cities and ultimately affects the negotiation of urban space. When speaking about death andarchitecture the discussion often centers in typologies ofFunerary and Religious architecture and the design of Cemeteries,Crematoriums, Memorials, Mausoleums and Sanitary institutions [1]. But death have more than mere formal implications in ourlife.

Trying to unveil how death helps shaping our cities, the projectDeath in Veniceintended tomake visible the invisiblemechanics of death and dying. By tracing the footprints of death in modern architecture, this project shows that dead inarchitecture has been studied basically from a memorial point of view. The narrative of architectural history of the 20thCentury is focused in health and progress, leaving scarce mentions to death and how its cultural experience helps to definethe urban fabric. Developments in medicine led to the appearance of modern hospital and health centers often defined bystrict bureaucratic processes and requirements, thus leaving an institutionalized and medicalized experience of death. After



presenting the exhibition Death in Venice as an independent event during the opening week of the 2014 Venice Biennale,theDeath in the Cityprojecthas evolvedto keep researching on the end-of-life threshold in an attempt to reconceivearchitecture associated to the human dimension of that process.

When talking about dead and the city, the work of Aristide Antonas inevitably comes to the discussion. InWeak Monuments,Antonas explores the function of the city as a murder place. He dives into the city with the passion of an archivist, exploringsignificant rooms and halls of the city: lawyers offices, the court house, police stations, the citys morgue, funeral offices, thecriminology department of the city. The project resulting is a register of the infrastructure of murder in the city of Thessalonikipresented as another archive including drawings, documents and texts. Even not clearly stated, we can trace the atmosphereof death in other of his works like theSinger and the Armchairor the retrieve proposed in theZizeks House.

The International Necronautical Society [INS] goes a step further, perceiving the death as a type of space, which can bemapped and inhabited. Formed in London by a group of artists, writers and thinkers, this fiction-like organisation wasfounded by the writer Tom McCarthy and the the philosopher Simon Critchley. Following the steps of Futurists and Surrealiststhey make an intensive use of manifestos, proclamations and denunciations which are broadcasted using printed mass media,publications, exhibitions and radio live events. In their founding manifesto we can read:

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing deaths beauty that is, beauty.

3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: inliterature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent forthe obfuscation Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are allnecronauts, always, already.

4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if notlive, then at least persist Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively,eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.



HenryHolidays map for The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll[2]

The activities and outcomes of the INS are displayed as the work of akafkianand cryptic Institution. They often carry a seriesof examinations in the city dealing with circulation, transmission of cultural issues related with death and cryptography. Mostlyperceived as an arty project we find intriguing and inspiring the elements they borrow from literature and cinema. Like themap appeared in The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll which metaphorically can represent multiple after-life explorationpossibilities or the capture of hidden transmission in the filmOrphe by Jean Cocteauwere the waves of the voice of a deadpoet is capturedin the car radioin the white-noise dead zone between stations.

When our loved ones pass away we built a composite of memories with the material traces they leave behind, mixed up withour experiences. This is the way we intend to preserve their presence among us. The idea of capturing human traces andmaterialize them, leading us to a sort of immortality, is now enhanced by the use of technology. Services likeeterni.meofferthe possibility to develop an avatar following a person digital activity and by means of Artificial Intelligence collect all theinformation, traces, and interactions to emulate digital behaviour and allow communication with other users even after dead.This possibility is also explored in the Black Mirror episodeBe Right Backwhere the possibility of immortality materializes bycloning the beloved ones.



Data Masks byStirling Crisping.

The ability to use digital traces to build human avatars is explored in the workData Masksby Stirling Crisping which illustratesthis post. In this project, Crispin shows how facebook uses reverse-engineering from surveillance face recognition algorithmsto fed their face-detection software. The result when he stops the process, before the algorithm creates a clear face, is aghost-like portrait. That portrait contains elements of several people interacting, but the introspective sense isthat you arelooking at yourself.

A more figurate attempt is explored by the Greek artist Erica Scourti in her workBody Scan, creating an autobiographicalportrait using pictures shared through various search engines attempting to link them to relevant online information. In herwords, this work constitutesa documented gesture of mediated intimacy told through iPhone screenshots.

Using a custom software, the work of the Seoul based artistsShinseungback Kimyonghuncreates the identity face of a movie.The software detects faces from every 24 frames of a selected movie, merging them in an average portrait of the film. Whiledefining the portrait of a life we use the static view of photographies, the ubiquity of digital devices allow people to shareportraits in almost real time printing dynamism to an intrinsically static action. It is intriguing to speculate that a composite ofall the images from dead peoplewould work as theirportraitswhen inhabitingthenecrospace,or could be used as models togenerate their clone appearance.



Avatar,Portrait, 2013, Pigment Inkjet Print, Variable dimensions.



Amlie,Portrait, 2013, Pigment Inkjet Print, Variable dimensions.

If at some point we will be able to recreate the experience of keep living with people who have died, the next step would givethem a space to dwell with us. Will be able to intervene in the design of thenecrospaceas claimed by the INS? Once againCharlie Broker gives us a clue on what shape this space could have. In the Black Mirror episodeWhite Christmas, atiny egg-shaped device[called cookie] contains a digital copy of the consciousness of one of the series protagonist with the aim tomanage her daily agenda and control her smart house. The emerging field ofConnectomicsstudy the synaptic connectionsbetween neurons inside a brain and mine data to improve the knowledge of neural connectivity. This could be a first steptowardsthe complete brain copyenvisioned by Broker.

It seems that the most risky proposals dealing with space after dead come from science fiction, as theNetherspaceproposedby the iconic Dr. Who series, described as around thing motif to the dcor: round window, round noticeboard, the hallwaycurving upwards as it disappears into the distance[3].Another good example would be the BorgesianLibrary of BabelshowninInterstellarfilm, a multiverse combination of aisles and bookshelves allowing multiple choices of time and position of booksand events.



Interstellar 5thdimension. A Multiverse similar to Infinite Library of Babel.

This combination of multiverses and bookshelves made us think on the question posed by Nanos Valaoritiswhen heasks,Can I go writing after death? Then Ill dictate to some living poet Ill inhabit after my death. The notion of an afterlife,being it through a digital device or by inhabiting a poet is part of human nature. When Borges again, wrote inThe Aleph:

I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of loveand the modification of death; I saw the Aleph fromevery point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my ownface and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured objectwhose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon the unimaginable universe.

We cant avoid thinking thatThe Aleph, that incomprehensible and indescribable space where Borges believes that death canbe modified, perhaps can be thenecrospacedescribed by the INS and that all the previous projects try to explain in differentformats and diverse ways of interpreting what is death and its transcendence.

So what would be the skills for designers [if any] taking the adventure to manage the space after life? More than mere formal,structural and symbolic ritual proficiency, they would certainly be immersed in the language of neuroscience, the metrics ofpoetry or the equations of quantum mechanics. To open gates and find connections using algorithms or poem lines, to finallyrealise that we all [the live and the dead ones]can still find each other inthe samespace. Andrealise that,following Paulluard,there is another world and it is this one.

___

[1]Death and Architecture: Introduction to Funerary and Commemorative Buildingsby James Stevens Curl.

[2]The Hunting of the Snark. An Agony in Eight Fits by Lewis Carroll. With nine illustrations by Henry Holiday

[3] Thanks@disquietingoosefor the hint about Netherspace.

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