Take off your shoes but keep your socks on before stepping onto the carpet and moving towards the coffins. You are about to enter a simulated sacred space.
Stine Deja’s GRAVE MATTERS is wonderfully ambivalent. Even the title suggests it. This ambivalence is typical of Deja, whose practice revolves around existential reflections that are both unsettling and seductive. Whether it’s cryogenically frozen bodies in sleeping bags that unconsciously live on after death or a roller coaster ride into your own grave, with Deja you often find yourself on the threshold between life and death, between biology and technology.
This time she turns her attention to the phenomenon of griefbots – a new technology that allows the bereaved to communicate with a digital version of their deceased using artificial intelligence. A kind of grief software where the spiritual has been digitally updated. Here you don’t enter a church but a simulated temple, where birds chirping and organ tones mix Zen-like serenity and churchgoing with the sounds of a self-optimization retreat. It’s nice, but also unsettling.
Feel free to open the coffin lids.
As on an autopsy table, the faces are washed out, overexposed, drained of blood – yet smiling and with eyes that seem warm. In medieval church art, eyes in sculptures and frescoes were emphasized as portals to the hereafter. They did not point to the lived life, but to the eternal.
The eyes in Deja’s griefbots have taken on a new digital form, but carry a similar meaning: behind the coffin lids, they stare out from screen surfaces as if reaching out to the beyond, but seem trapped in a loop where eternal life is merely simulated.
Cultural theorists Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer have described a new type of human, exemplified by griefbots: digital simulants that ensure human survival in the information age. Even if our physical bodies succumb to death, the digitized doppelganger promises that if death wasn’t final after all, we might wake up again – anywhere, anytime. And suddenly the present is teeming with the dead. According to forecasts, by 2070 there will be more deceased users on Facebook than living ones. Like Snow White, they lie in a glass coffin, waiting to be clicked back to life.
But can the eternal even exist in such a future scenario? Deja’s griefbots are both functional and relational – but also extinguishable. The wires winding between the coffins look like relics from the cemetery of the future, indicating that these griefbots may be designed for eternal life, but can be turned off at any time.
In Deja’s speculative universe, bodies adapt to a future of eternal life that will most likely never come. Nevertheless, the artist takes their fates seriously and gives the digitally deceased a significant place in this temple of futurism, where they wait to receive your grief…
–Sif Lindblad
