Jorge Luis Borges said in an interview with The New Yorker (1986), “when writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” Perhaps the modern day reincarnation is embodied in the digital profiles that we create online. As Rheingold (1993) puts it, people constantly “reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen”. Even after physical death, these digital identities live on, continuing to leave traces and reside within the online world.
“Digital Afterlife” is an exploration of digital identities that live on after the death of its user through a series of moving image portraits. Inspired by unconventional materials and distortion of the human facial features (which is an important form of identification in the physical world), “Digital Afterlife” is the attempt to imagine and recreate the unknown world of the digitally immortal.