Artefact #0 — Digital Necrophony

Inspired by Edison’s necro­phone, this instal­la­tion project aims at stag­ing a very intru­sive rela­tion­ship to death in a hyper-medi­at­ed soci­ety. In what could be seen as some­what of a dig­i­tal grave, the body is no longer phys­i­cal­ly stored, but rather encod­ed — along with an exhaus­tive library of per­son­al details — into a sin­gle cylin­der of marble.

In a first phase, the mem­o­ry stor­age cylin­der is set to rotate while being read by a mov­ing arm car­ry­ing a light sen­sor. Once enough data has been col­lect­ed, a sec­ond phase starts where a sam­ple of per­son­al infor­ma­tion — may it be bio­met­ric, or a mem­o­ry — is recom­piled into an audio-visu­al stream. The instal­la­tion then turns back again into “read-mode”, and loops through the data.