Have you ever thought of erasing your entire digital footprint? All those selfies, archived emails, tweets, likes, check-ins, late night chat sessions...We never really know what to do with our old storage devices, hard drives, old phones full of our secrets, and sometimes, secrets that we have forgotten about ourselves, or at least forgotten their imprint. Because we are afraid of letting them go, because we are not sure we want to get rid of them, because we wonder what will happen to them, who would find them, and what would they do with them...we do not know whether or not our anxieties are justified, but we still have them.

 

The digital data funeral is meant as futile ritual of erasure that reflects upon big data analysis and surveillance fueled by social networking sites, and the technological infrastructure of the network. The work is presented as an installation, a graveyard of embalmed devices as pictured in the image above. Other iterations of this project have included embalming workshops (using some of the so-called Snowden files) and data embalming performances.

 

In an opnineg performance Audrey Samson shows a data embalming using "Snowden Files".