by Rebecca Edwards
"For Data You Are, And To Data You Shall Return" is an online exhibition exploring digital death, rebirth, and reincarnation through various digital media. The showcase, part of arebyte’s "The Body, The Mind, The Soul" programme, includes generative, video, and gamified creations that explore the cyclical nature of existence in technological, physical, and spiritual realms. The exhibition presents expanded video practices, role-playing narratives, and reconnection with devices, highlighting decay, renewal, and rethinking our existence in the digital and environmental domain.
The title subtly references theological concepts from Genesis, suggesting non-immortality, echoing Chinese Buddhist philosophy and the idea of karma's role in the afterlife. By infusing the interface with generative backgrounds, exposing coded processes, and likening data to "dust you shall return to," the exhibition symbolises the continuous cycle of existence. However, despite the renewal and purpose found in digital realms, systemic infrastructure often introduces barriers, censorship, and capitalist ideologies.
Across cultures and centuries, the cyclical nature of life mirrors the process of data collection and transfer. Visitors contribute data upon entering, which is then visualised as spectral traces of previous users. This passive digital footprint, including interaction patterns and IP addresses, evolves over time, manifesting as heat-maps and visible background code. Visitors can download their personalised data pathways, prompting reflection on data usage and its potential for renewal and rediscovery of suppressed narratives.
The exhibition highlights the symbiotic relationship between users, data, and browsers, revealing extrinsic conditions shaping digital existence. It visualises a ghost within the machinic interface, revealing hidden layers eroded by human interaction and data, serving as a reminder of causality.
Curatorial Notes & Provocations…
Throughout the exhibition planning, Milia and I discussed a lot of topics before deciding more concretely on the focus we wanted to address. We talked about a ghost in the machinic interface a lot, a concept we felt reflected on the idea of a transitional presence, an ethereal essence that bridges the gap between the physical and digital realms. By imbuing the platform interface with a ghostly quality, and by inferring to data as the dust you shall return to, we saw a search to symbolise the continuous cycle of existence, where relics and bodies find new life and purpose within the digital domain that is fraught with barriers, boundaries and censorship.
We also spoke about data and cookies, especially with Studio 10PM who became pivotal in the way we utilised user data in the website. Originally we were keen to have a ghostly reminder of previous visitors, by some sort of translucent mouse signifyng older and dead movement. We decided upon a heat-map as a way of showing your past interactions with the website instead.
Taking into account the way data is mined, manipulated and spread without consent, we spoke about how the exhibition could encourage contemplation of how the digital space can become a sanctuary for renewal, healing, and the rediscovery of lost or suppressed narratives via this same data. Referencing dead drops, spectral presences, traces of exploration and digital death, we were keen for the exhibition also acknowledges the barriers and boundaries that exist within such spaces, prompting viewers to question and challenge the limitations imposed on our collective data and the continuous evolution of our existence in the digital domain.
We also spoke a lot about the way you can inspect a website, and what this might mean in relation to back end, codified languages and data attributes given to the works.
How to redefine intelligence, sensation and psychosomatic attributes?
How can one imagine machine intelligence / code / algorithm / the network as an agentic entity of another order, capable of subjectivity other than that of humans?
Amorphous, even metamorphic : A collective assemblage of issues
Dust – The crystal of temporality - dust marks the temporality of matter, a processual materiality of piling up, segmenting, and – through its own million-year process – transformations of solids to ephemeral and back (Jussi Parikka).
Data - obsolescent technology, dissolved care, abandoned memories – decay
Dust – air – breath – externalisation, extension
Data - digital footprints - dissolve form and disclose shape – internal – external
The entropy of data : How do we visualise these data packets being left behind?
IP addresses become reconfigured into some sort of “sigil” spat out on the website?
For us, death is imaginative, and it is more of a 'narrative'. And death in the digital world is (in a particular dimension) describable, observable, and even manufacturable (database deletion), as well as manageable (data repair). The "life" in the digital world is, on the contrary, more mysterious. We know it is or it has to be disruptive, but we can't say exactly what it will be. It's like death in the real world. (But am I being too binary here?)
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We see the cyclical nature of data and users, as well as the fragility of such data and its relation to the increasing fragility of society and the environment in the works of XU Haomin and Iris Xiaoyu QU. For Haomin’s work Glimpse, a floating, rotating animation inside the guise of an iron meteorite slowly encroaches on the screen until it fills it. The thoroughly polished cross section of the iron meteorite hints at the location it once occupied through a mirror reflection, while the light source illuminating the iron meteorite changes its position based on the user's time zone. Contrary to the way attention economy is ingrained within current Internet culture, Glimpse only displays itself when the user is technologically inactive by not performing any mouse operations. It is hidden in plain sight. Once the user touches the mouse, the work disappears instantly. The audience must access the exhibition slowly to retrieve this element or learn from their mistakes of frivolous interaction with the screen to show the work. Correspondingly, this work is growing in users' agnosia, reflecting their geological notations and psychological stack. In Glimpse, meteorites exist as the coalescence of dust. It can be understood as the amorphous, sedimenting, easy-eluding entities that form geological strata and mark temporality, as well as the circulating, calculating, peer-networked components entangled in issues of labour, economy, representations, and discourses.
For Iris, we see the interplay of an algorithmic coexistence with the surrounding ecosystem in Symbiotic AI. This three-perspective work, a narrative of unlearning unfolds through human, animal and AI outlooks of the same scene - a turbulent weather season around a data centre. As the simulation progresses, the AI unlearns planetary, human-centric datasets and gains dynamic, adaptive, and hyper-local insights from nature to form a cybernetic language of symbiosis.
Rebecca Allen’s landscape / enter / life marks a voyeuristic return to Emergence: a computer system that Allen developed in the late 1990s, able to generate artificial life - an AI system that simulates life-like behaviours of animated artificial lifeforms. As a playable game, the work allows for the creation of multi-participant virtual worlds that are alive, responsive and interactive. Activities and events emerge, including performances and non-linear stories and music, depending on the relationships and interactions between the avatar and the artificial life forms. Here, complex social environments can emerge through the interactions of simple behaviours.
For the exhibition, however, we witness a pre-played narrative recorded as a single video. The explorative journey of the environment is witnessed through the eyes of an unseen third person, an unnamed avatar of the uncanny and unfamiliar world. The viewer becomes an observer of this closed artificial world and the life that inhabits it and, unable to influence or change its pattern of events, becomes an inactive agent in the unmediated confrontation between the game environment and the abstracted life forms with their own rules of behaviour.
Crosslucid's work, Dwellers Between the Waters, triggers nonlinear storytelling with artificial intelligence, managing and digesting melancholy with the climate crisis, violence, displacements, and capitalist exploitations. Writer and scholar Yiou Penelope Peng notes that "by evoking, cultivating and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the 'dwellers' who inhabit in and among 'realities' to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to the (so-called) reality as evolving strings materialising across both physical and virtual domains to (hopefully) bring novel perspectives for further changes."
The work will develop narratives of physical presence, trauma, memory, healing and virtuality unfolding as particular video outputs dependent upon users' geographical locations and other sweat data. This unveiling process illuminates the diverse and intricate alchemical procedures involved in mediating the interplay between reality and data exchange. The work also instils a ritual of unveiling within it: a series of actions within the exhibition completed in a specific order reveals a hidden video work, a “port lock-in ritual”. Engaging in the hidden data within the exhibition furthers the reciprocation between user and experience, evoking echoes between the exhibiting artworks, and blending the physical properties of the browsing window and fortuitous keystrokes.
Conjured as a series of hybrid rituals and polyphonic mediations, the multimodal project seeks possible solutions in response to the griefs of the contemporary anthropos. By evoking, cultivating and connecting various forms of consciousness, it invites the ‘dwellers’ to a sharing of stories and experiences, which re~turn to the (so-called) reality as evolving strings of collaborative re-imaginations.
The plight for healing technological grief is activated in the work of Alice Yuan Zhang and her project Reconnecting... This web-based research project delves into the vertical, manipulable layers of computing infrastructure, connecting the stacks underneath the interfaces, the strata of buried digital infrastructure, and the labour force hidden behind the screens.
The viewers walk through technological debris scattered across the screen, peeling off the material layers of technological objects and observing the entanglement and mutation between the bit and the bio. Ultimately, in front of an abandoned mine, where tree roots are intertwined with wires, there may be no expected solutions for the confusion on technological innovation and acceleration, on who to link to and why, only material exhaustion, echoing grief, relentless signals and infinite reconnecting.
Such reconnection, on the one hand, offers guidance for those mourning the loss of technological entities. Framing grief of the digital in this way offers a space for radical relation-making beyond hegemonic Western norms and forefronts the often unspoken, inner dialogues we have with ourselves. On the other hand, such reconnection imposes rituals where non-human relics, sorrow, breath, wires, cells and signals are entangled, calling for a collective, embodied metabolism and rehabilitation. For the artist, grieving invites humour and vulnerability and allows for different tensions to be held to account when unpacking a dominant system that infiltrates all of us.
Healing and grief simulation through data is also seen in the fictitious work FuneralPlay by Ruini Shi. Clicking through familiar, albeit fake, boxes of data consent, data uploading, and crypto wallet syncing, the interactive work situates viewers into various gamified funeral spaces that aesthetically mimic early 2000s web games. This work delves into the possibilities of virtualisation and tokenisation within the realm of commemorating and mourning. By creating six electronic mourning halls, FuneralPlay also fictionalises six legendary life stories which examine the intricate emotional and ethical values intertwined with mortality and the afterlife. Furthermore, the work considers collective voyeurism through the synced chat box of condolence messages from other passers-by.
Hunting for clues to adorn the walls and floors with nostalgic remnants, collecting ghosts, and finding other gamified easter eggs, the work asks how digital legacies are to be distributed through Web 3.0 and how this will affect and mediate the future of human relationships. In terms of technological architecture, Web 3.0 digital infrastructures can be seen as immortal places for remembrance, while on the subject of psychological framework, how will our "wet" emotions empathise with the kernel that promotes zero-trust?
In a similar vein to Ruini's FuneralPlay, April Lin 林森's video essay Digital Traces explores how social media and cyberspace can act as a means of mourning, recalling and commemoration. In their nested film narrative, death is elongated, transformed from a momentary state into a performance, a hyperlinked association, a string of passwords, captchas, retweets, and emojis, a collective cooperation and a collective political claim.
From emotional release on live-streaming platforms to viral homages following a celebrity's passing, the definition of death begins to wander between the private and the public spheres. The film ends with an eerie calling from Space Inc., a configuration of space, time and embodiment, and a speculative condition of possibility for our experience and existence. Linking the intangible with the tangible, we are told “immortality is just a few centimetres away”; in fact, we merely become suspended in the no-ending loading process.
Technological objects interplay with time; technologies discipline and alter the trajectory, perceptual space and the scale of temporality, yet are inevitably corrupted by it. In a long epitaph in The Dead Media Project, Bruce Sterling offers condolences to "the failures, collapses, and hideous mistakes of media". The birth of some technological applications is imbued with an inevitable being-towards-death - you always need to replace an old machine with a new one, as long as you are still using it. Is this death and rebirth circle of technological objects, in fact, a misunderstanding of the true nature, temporality and behaviour of technology led by commercial pressures and marketing intervention?
Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz's Zombie Media theory continues further from Sterling’s ideas by claiming that “media do not die but persists as electronic waste, toxic residue, and its own sort of fossil layer of disused gadgets and electronics". The media of interest in this exhibition, the digital entities, are, as mentioned by these media theorists, dislocating and attaching themselves in bundles of yellow fibre-optic cables, underneath the geological strata, within the mountains, and under the oceans, participating in the life and decay cycle of transistors, dust, gravel, water droplets, and barnacles.
Apart from the decomposition and metamorphosis of their material basis, digital entities also perform by being replaced, decrypted and obliterated through processes of time, changeable systems and planned obsolescence. Technologies extend humans' memories, however, they also become forgotten in the process of forgetting. Deleted photos, unattended games, abandoned blogs, and obsolescent software, the advanced development of digital entities made its ontological presence a flickering uncertainty. There always seems to be an iteration that makes the "death" in the digital world seem like an optimising “reborn”. Nonetheless, ancient codes have always been the underlying computer language's profound and immutable logic, becoming a hidden act of spelling, a psychic that manipulates hardware, a ghost that latches onto the material substrate.
For Data You Are, And to Data You Shall Return is a decaying exhibition: the interface is gradually stripped down to its code, which may one day cease to function; alternatively, and more likely, it will fade away in people's memories and become the fault of Epimetheus. However, for it is data, and so to data it shall return, the exhibition will haunt in/on the cloud, waiting for an inadvertent click and resurrection.
