Vaissnavi Shukl
We are going to talk about death in this episode. If you have recently experienced loss, or are sensitive when it comes to conversations on death, please feel free to skip this one. For me, today’s episode is important because I don’t think we talk about death enough. Especially the technical and logistical part of death. Like how does one’s economic status affect the conditions in which they die? Do gender-identities play a role in how people receive end-of-life care? Can we choose the memories that we want to leave behind for our loved ones? And how does social media become an archive of one’s life after passing? With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we speak to artist and professor of Contemporary Art at University of Oxford, Oreet Ashrey about death in the digital age.
I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not occupy the centre stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.
As long as you can hear me, I think we’re good to start.

Oreet Ashery
Okay, I can hear you.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Okay. Oreet, I was thinking about Revisiting Genesis and before we get into the details of your project and your research and your practice? I thought we could start with Revisiting Genesis and if we can talk about the origins, the ideas, the expression that you’ve explored in Revisiting Genesis, and I think what struck to me, especially while watching it was the very possibility of all of it coming through it was almost like Black Mirror-ish. So if you just want to get started with with that project.

Oreet Ashery
The original Revisiting Genesis, I guess, it was a kind of intersection of a number of things that took place and kind of collided together into the so one of them was that I reached the age of 50. And I was just looking through my boxes in my office at old photographs and I picked 10 photographs that I kind of was drawn to, and I wrote a short section about each one just as a way for myself, just as a way of sort of reflecting on on my life around that time, and kind of get into that kind of particular age. And, as I started to write about it, I started to think about memory and I started to think about life cycles and I started to understand that even though I thought that I kind of invent the wheel every time in my practice, actually, it’s not the case. It’s actually quite cyclical and quite interconnected and that there is a trajectory in the practice and everything is connected. So I just felt more integrated in myself. And that idea I later was echoed in when I was later on when I considered the work and I started to talk to doctors and nurses, particularly people who are working with dementia the idea of showing pictures or sharing or playing music to patients or people who experienced issues with memory and with dementia. That kind of narrative narrating your life storytelling really helped the sense of integration that started seeing a memory as an identity and the role that memory plays in how…yeah, how we perceive ourselves so that that was one thing. Another thing was that my brother died in 2008 and I guess it took me all this years later, to be able to you know that people say that every seven years we’ve kind of like enter another spiritual phase in our life and, and I guess it was seven years later that I started to think about his death in relation to making work about this really and how he died and because it affected me because after he died, I found myself for years living in that preparedness, so I was always preparing to die. So I have cleaned everything, I’ve left kind of notes to people like not a will as such, but I started to really think about what we leave behind and what does that mean to people kind of loved ones around us when that happened. Another thing was what I started to notice on the internet, on Facebook people starting to use the medium of Facebook to talk about death, particularly the artist Alexis Hunter recorded her death on right till the end. Right right till the end, I think right until maybe 24 hours or 48 hours before she died her time. At the hospice and memorialising also her practice in relation to that. That affected me quite deeply, which is quite an underrecognized feminist practitioner. That has affected me a lot. Another friend recorded Ian white, who was dying at the time, kind of an amazing writer scene. CO curator in London, but also Facebook itself started to do these pop ups where they remind you of people and then as it happened, one of them was somebody who died and I started to think around that what happens when you have been called to think of somebody in the middle of your day and that person actually died. So I started to think of Facebook as a kind of graveyard and I started to read about that and there was a lot of writing around ideas around sort of exactly that the sort of the death industry in Facebook. All these things started to come together. It was also a menace work in 2016. And it was also kind of the year of the kind of web services. So suddenly people started to move away from watching TV into watching various kinds of web services as entertainment on their laptops. And so I was curious what artists might do with the genre of the web series, taking away from entertainment into something probably slightly, a bit perhaps heavier. It’s true that at some point I did look at Black Mirror. I was only interested in one episode where I think someone’s boyfriend died and came back. So I was interested in how they portrayed him.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Ah, it was in this house where they had like a life sized version of that person re-living as a real person is that one yeah.

Oreet Ashery
And it was interesting because they didn’t take it too far. He literally… The actor looks like himself. They made him slightly paler, but it was him. But there was only one thing for me to do with a glass or something that went through his hand. There’s a trial of special effects but it was very minimal and for me that made it more powerful because they didn’t try to ghost him or to make any special effect. It literally was the same actor, the same person, her boyfriend but we know that he’s kind of some kind of digital ghost or something. So that kind of made me realise that I’m not going to make something that visually is going to look like futuristic in that sense of using special effects. That I was more interested in people’s feelings and more interested in people’s kind of emotions around how we die and how our death isn’t being memorialised online. And how we become virtual beings on the afterlife is on the internet portrayed more from a humanistic perspective rather than kind of try to portray sort of technology and the digital world in this kind of high production way because because production because technology changes all the time. I didn’t want the work to feel really dated in like three years. Don’t be like people. Oh yeah. In 2016 This is how it looked. But now it’s completely different. I wanted to stay with those things that don’t change so much, which is how we feel about things. So that was the origin and then from then on. It’s a very long answer to your question, but it’s just given the whole overview. From then on I went to write the script. It was 12 episodes. It’s quite an ambitious piece. So in a sense, it’s 12 short films, portraying the life of an artist who is possibly dying or disappearing or withdrawing. A friend is trying to help her through looking at a series of slideshows of her work, trying to bring her back to life. So that and that was combined with interviews with real life, people with real life, life limiting conditions. So people who have things like cystic fibrosis or cancer or brand new memories and different conditions and how that affects the lives but particularly how they think and of deaths and archiving the lives in kind of digital archiving and ways of positiveness ways of keeping in touch with the living. So that’s the overview of the project, I guess.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So I’ll be very honest and open and sharing this. So two days ago, my best friend lost her brother and a massive cardiac arrest and we were at the hospital and he was very young. And unfortunately, he did pass away. But it really made me think about what you’re talking about in terms of the memories that you leave people with, right and all these avenues in terms of how digital media becomes an almost archive of that person’s life. And because I just finished watching Revisiting Genesis a couple of days before that, it made me think about, you know, the question of authorship when it comes to preparing or storing that memory or that digital archive as what do you call this slideshow in Revisiting Genesis as something that a person who is receiving end of life care has the power and the authorship to to curate a certain kind of archive or to select the memories that they would leave behind versus in the format of a eulogy, where somebody who has not had any time to do that? Somebody who’s had an accidental death? You actually the author is somebody else, maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s a family member who’s curating the whole different set of memories that you know, they present as what they remember of this person in the absence of a certain kind of archive. And I’ve never really thought about this as an artistic project of sorts, but I’ve been thinking about that question of authorship and its relationship to memory or even end of life care. And I would love to know what you think about the origin of such an archive or whatever we call it, even if there’s a Facebook page or an Instagram page or which might not be made with a specific purpose of leaving behind memories. I mean, something as intentional as you mentioned, writing letters to to people because you’re preparing to leave, you know, and you want to address that but otherwise if in case of like an accidental death or something, it’s just whatever digital footprint you’ve already left ends up becoming their archive and and platforms do aid in in creating those right because Facebook I remember I deleted Facebook, but there was an option of selecting a legacy contact. So in case you pass away, Facebook allowed you to nominate somebody who would become your legacy contact. What do you think about just this whole idea of authorship and of memory and, and the emergence of these archives?

Oreet Ashery
Yeah. Well, this is a great question and this is kind of a lot of the whole because the area of digital, there’s it’s kind of generally this area has been termed digital deaths. And it’s a new area, so relatively new, so an emergent area so there’s been so many kinds of discussions in terms of ethically and legally around all that so that there is a number of things. So yes, so for example, with Facebook, there’s a whole sort of debate, particularly around the very painful area of teenage suicide where parents want access to the Facebook of the child who passed away whether that should be allowed or not, so they can find out what happened. You know, for example, different people with different opinions call for different legislation of either protecting families in a sense of allowing access to allowing access to large legacy contacts, allowing access to people’s life after the passed away. And then the other way where people will need to protect people’s privacy and say, no, nobody should be able to do that. And of course, within that there are issues because we do leave that behind. So in a sense if traditionally, you’d have like material things and some of us are lucky enough to have those even if it’s a laptop or even if it’s let’s say yeah, people pass away what do you do with that laptop? Where do all some people have, you know, property or not you live behind really what’s really behind and especially creative professionals, who a lot of people their property is intellectual and digital, but they could be a lot of valuable emotionally vulnerable, psychologically vulnerable, intellectually valuable content and what happens to that so I’d say in response, I’d say that there have been in there are a lot of debate around that also, not so much in relation to death, but just generally it’s we’re entering this kind of new phase now where children who were portrayed on social media are now starting to sue the parents because now to reach the age of 18. They starting to sue the parents who did that without permission without consent. Because once you do that, when it says start documenting your kind of child’s everyday life, obviously that content just stays forever. So what happens with that so all those kinds of ethical questions are seeing quite urgent and quite debatable in different ways. And obviously, there are darker sides to it in different ways when people want to find out what happened to people or let’s say, maybe were murdered by somebody who was very close to them. Or for example, a read other time when I was researching a few articles about a woman who lost her partner, husband and she felt uncomfortable with everything that was online remaining of him, wanted to kind of kind of clean it up sort of have a closure and hired a company I think Swedish company that kind of promised her that they can do that they can literally clean the remains of that person for virtually and she describe that process and how long it took and how difficult it is to actually do that. In reality, you know that there are some books been written about kind of exactly that about how we should be conscious of our kind of what is the quality, the kind of the crumbs and we leave that almost like showing the way to something, you know, we were leaving so much so many traces that we might want to be more private about. Again, all that is just constantly evolving and our pattern of right to privacy has been massively compromised. More and more. So the discussions are kind of changing all the time, clearly, you know, with kind of data harvesting and all that. So yeah, I think this sort of global level questions of authorship or on a more kind of domestic level, let’s say, within this work, what I found out for myself and from talking to people researching it is that particularly for minorities, our control of legacy is very important. So we might kind of say, Oh, I can’t be bothered to kind of archive all materials and that’s where there’s a part in the in the one of the episodes where Genesis the artists, the main character is saying it’s a fictional character. Concern about my archive is a mess, it’s like a mess. She’s not saying that her friends are saying they’re looking at her Arthur Evans like their mess, but in certain ways, because certain minority discourses are perhaps less heard and less documented. There’s a kind of a particular knowledge that comes with certain discourses that is not within a dominant culture, but also in the area of how we die, how we live and how we die that there is an importance in archiving and good case study with Barbara Hammer. The artist Barbara Hammer who died quite recently and they beautifully wrote and spoke about the need for archiving and particularly for artists of the legacy and yet particularly of minorities and outsiders and people whether the stories are less heard. So for me, that was my kind of, I think I came into making the word kind of more cynically looking at archiving more cynical and coming out at the other end. I just thought actually, those kind of self-curatorial or externally curatorial projects of archiving people’s artists’ legacies are also important, what came up through filming and for people talking to people who experience life limiting conditions is that perhaps you don’t have the energy to do that. When you feel like this. You don’t you just you’re not thinking I’m going to spend a day archiving you know, you have other you kind of wanted to maybe other things. We also spoke about that kind of practical solutions, ways of…creative ways of archiving. What is an archive? Yeah, what is the slideshow? What is legacy and some of it can be as simple as telling a friend somebody telling, you know, like one of the nurses I spoke to spoke to a few experts and she was a cancer nurse and she said that she encountered this phenomena where people who thought she thought might die any minute didn’t. And then they’ll hold her hand and tell her in a few hours, some of the secrets or something important artists from their lives and then they could peacefully die. They allow themselves to die. So I think that needs to kind of have somebody witnessing your narrative or narratives is clearly very important in whatever way. But another aspect of the project was that in this emergent areas, a lot of companies capitalising on it and that was the point of it of the critique of capitalism was that while capitalism kind of extract from us when we alive, it also now extract from us when they die, because they give you these different companies give you different kind of memorialization options like can leave those kind of videos to your loved one and they’ll send it to them every year, let’s say 15 years suddenly, you’ll get a video from you know, somebody close to you who died telling you like Happy birthday or something, or those kinds of augmented reality, AR or hybrid tombstone where you could go to a grave and kind of login to someone’s let’s call it like slideshow or whatever online to enhance the experience of because the saying that people’s visiting kind of cemeteries is declining so as to kind of enhance that experience for example, or they’re kind of yeah, those kind of legacy managers where they’ll kind of take the password of everything and just keep keep your legacy basically. So that all the other side of it like like I explained the example somebody who wants to actually get rid of everything as a legacy clean it up like clean the digital footprint, clean digital footprint, that’s also something that other companies capitalise on So, I was kind of quite disturbed by that kind of notion of capitalising on us, not only going to be alive.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And something else that you know also struck me Oreet, was because you mentioned capitalization of people’s identities and memories. And also you spoke about the minorities here. I’m going to pull out something that you mentioned in the exhibition guidebook for misbehaving bodies, and I think it was very profound so you said and I quote, you said, debt is an exaggerated form of life. So if you’re poor and you become ill, you will become poor. Then you go on to say the economy of marginality people experience over their lives becomes heightened in debt. And I thought that this correlation of social status of a person to what their possible condition could be when they are ill, and how that minority or that marginality becomes more pronounced. When they are dying I think it was a very astute observation. Can you talk a little bit about this school of thought?

Oreet Ashery
Yeah, so so very, very true. All that happened pre-COVID. But COVID Exactly showed us that exactly demonstrated that kind of injustice. Or that reality and in other times, yeah, when I was sort of researching for work and talking to various people, doctors, nurses, digital death experts, people with illnesses, and reading books. It became clear that certain bodies die in different conditions and and it became clear to me that it’s exactly that that how you how and that’s how I chattel, the the book that came out of this work as well. The most publication book, how we die is how we live on the more so and so for example, especially if people talk a lot about death and loneliness and who is around you when you die and and all that and, and I think the idea of dying now is becoming more of an art form if you like thinking at least in the West, people think about it, perhaps more performative ly more creatively.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Can you elaborate that as a performance or?

Oreet Ashery
Yeah, so there’s a lot more kind of, for example, in North America, I’ve read in Canada for example, there’s a lot of this sort of quite performative ways of taking pictures for with a dead which have the original in the kind of origin of photography or the original ideas around magic and around kind of sounds in that photograph in the dead. And a different ecologically, the different ways of thinking burial kind of ecological burial are more ecologically kind of beneficial to the land. So I think people are starting to think about death and dying in slightly more expanded ways and or, for example, a read in Vice magazine that in I think Korea, this whole genre of people who perform the death fall, let’s say that they pay money to go to this kind of workshop. And in that workshop is like, you pretend that you die like tomorrow let’s say. So you go through all the ritual of writing goodbye letters to everybody, and then you’re going into a coffin. And there is…there’s a hole. Really there is oxygen. Yeah, yeah. If you go into a Vice you can access it. And the benefit of that they said the benefit of that was that it was almost like a life boost. So after six months afterwards, people had much more lifeforce, more chi, more energy, like they appreciated life again. So I think we really, I mean, people always done that, but I think this became something more of a taboo in a modern capitalist world. And I think people are now starting to really see it more as a continuum. So okay, we’ll we’ll leave but then also we don’t sometimes we just die, but sometimes dying itself is a process you know, so how do I do that? And so yeah, loneliness is profound. Especially I talk to a lot of nurses about that and, and you see that so if people for whatever reason, let’s say, through immigration or exile, found themselves living a lonely life, when they were dying and dander up became very exaggerated, because nobody came to the hospital to see them all. There was nobody in the funeral. So these things become quite acute. Same with poverty, you know, if you’re, you’re poor anyway, let’s say you define you can’t work anymore. You collect that you can pay for your funeral, you know, like, people come in every way. Issues of marginality become exaggerated, either psychologically or financially or through the law, or like for example, with the LGBTQIA plus community, if you’re not legally married to somebody, and you die, where does that leave you in terms of inheritance? Where does that leave in terms of hospital visits, who’s got priorities, that’s also varies from country to country. So that all those kinds of inheritance law very much can be very kind of gendered, gendered as well. And again, for women the other issues that come with that kind of ideas of dying and death because in certain societies and periods of history women wouldn’t inherit, you know, they were not allowed to inherit anything. All these areas are the ones that I have been thinking about.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to connect this directly to Misbehaving Bodies because I thought that that exhibition that included your work and also Jo Spencer’s work and how she had documented her journey through cancer and the treatment and everything that she experienced in the process of, of that sickness, I think was a very interesting juxtaposition how one is kind of archiving the process and one who is talking about the ideas of archiving. What were some of the other threads that you thought were emerging out of that exhibition between your work and Jo’s work?

Oreet Ashery
Yeah, again, that’s a really, really good question. I guess. For me, my encounter with her work was when I was a student in the early 90s. I did my BA fine art in Sheffield of the north of England, and I came across her work. And I even found a sketchbook with quotes from her work that I had at the time. So when we were put together in a show, it was quite a lot of amazing feeling for me because of that history and and that kind of prompted me to look for those sketchbook and and find all this kind of stuff that I took from her and I think at this time as the art students I had like an argument with her in the sketchbook where she talks about illness and and I remember my response I’ve kind of wrote in response to that on in my sketchbook that illness is not a binary that that it’s a continuum and spectrum and all that and so I guess weirdly I had a dialogue with her and her practice. And I found her influential at the time in the way that I guess she dealt with what I’ve always been interested in which is narrating one’s identity, and how she’s done that through many photography and within the exhibition, I think the point of interest was probably the transgenerational dialogue, and how I guess when my work issues of technology became a lot more played a bigger part than when she was alive and made work. So that was one thing. The threads I guess where that we both I mean, I’m actually just thinking about it through one of the reviews, The Guardian reviews, because she actually touched on that question. So she talked about how we both a bit kind of what she said a bit like shameless stopping not feel shame to or guilt to talk about this, or to talk about difficult issues, or things that are kind of not like a dirty or kind of unpleasant or we unapologetic I think that’s a word like unapologetic in the approach. I think she said that we both don’t look at death and illness as a kind of something heroic, or something that you’re meant to do politely or nicely. And I think that’s really, really important. Because this thing, maybe more in Christian societies, which I don’t come from, but I think there is a lot of tonne of sense around, at least in the west around this idea of dying politely dying nicely, kind of not kind of making too much noise around it or screaming or arguing or you know, just doing it in a dignified way. And David Wojnarowicz, an artist who died from AIDS, was talking about that he said that he didn’t want to die but he wanted to die with rage. He wanted to shout and scream and yeah not be polite about it. So I guess that’s another. Perhaps I guess we both occupy certain outsider-ish positions in some ways, in our practices, because of all of that and the imagery that we use. The preoccupation itself with illness. There’s quite going quite deep in both cases and I think the Wellcome Collection, the institution was positively surprised by an exhibition that was eight months it was so long and he was so busy. And the did the thing with a subject like this people just won’t come who wants to come to an exhibition about their Stein and illness, but actually there was so much appetite for it and people spend hours in the space and like the tech rest, and then they’ll because I have those seats where you could literally like sleep, you know, like it’s very important to me that people are comfortable and I had this huge teddy bears that people were cuddling and falling asleep in and blankets and so people could literally spend a long time with the work and kind of index both both works architecturally the space was we’ve thought a lot about as relationships and we ended up using a kind of perforated fabric, so my work was shown a lot in those kind of tent like structures but the fabric was perforated so you could see Jo Spencer’s work through my sort of tent structure. So that architecture the works were divided but kind of perforated so it’s not kind of softly divided. So that was a nice touch I think as well to the exhibition. We both had our name so I have my name in the exhibition in a kind of innocence of a cannery to Nino’s it are very, very large copper copper plate cut out that was hanging below a massive kind of jewellery and hers was a bit more like the Hollywood sign kind of designing the show in a way that made connections I think we both have our timeline kind of get, I guess I legacy represented in a way that kind of chronologically. I had a piece that was also participatory, where I asked people the question, ” Do you consider yourself healthy?” and people responded and then responded in those kinds of anonymous little pieces of paper and put them into boxes, which later, were performed anonymously by actors. But those are some of the answers that people gave were influenced by Joe Spencer’s presence in the room and her work and how people felt about her work. And how her work made them think about illness as well and also a critique of the medical profession and how they kind of infantilized her and all dominated having different ways and so that was sort of and I guess my critique was more towards those kind of industries. That capitalised on people who are dying. So I guess there was also institutional critique for both of us in the work.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I have it in my notes as well. I, you’ve said you said one of the aims of the exhibition was to complicate the binary between health and sickness and think of these terms as a sliding scale rather than absolute as our closing question I wanted to ask you, what do you think is the is the next possible scenario when it comes to thinking about death thinking about illness? Thinking about it, maybe I’ll just call the episode on death in the digital age, but where do you think this is, this is heading?

Oreet Ashery
It’s hard to predict. But as far as we can predict anything, I think, in terms of technology and automation and AI and all that, we’re probably moving towards more this idea of avatars more the ideas of data harvesting, where the creation of posthumously kind of afterlife avatar of ones will become the norm. So the idea that for the loved ones, you could still have a conversation with somebody and have to die with an avatar is probably proliferating the same as we’ve seen this celebrity culture. So I think that we’ll probably see that I think the laws around like you were saying about authorship privacy in terms of legacy and the virtual world will have to be formalised.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, I think so do

Oreet Ashery
In particular, I think about consensual images around children’s presence on non consensual kinds of appearance of people, including children and animals. On social media, for example, I think the performativity and ritual sense of deaths were like sim based funerals and that will bro more the sort of technologically hybrid forms of memorialization whether it’s through whether it’s ashes using rashes, whether it’s psychological barriers, up Urals whether it’s you know, grey stones will develop. So, yeah, I think it’s again, it’s just like life. The presence of technology, and various technological intelligences will become more apparent as it is in life.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation or I think I was really looking forward to this. And something that I really want to talk about is we talk about health and we talk about medicine, and we talk about care, but we don’t talk about death as often. So, thank you so much.

Oreet Ashery
Thank you so much for your brilliant engagement and questions.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.