Platforms for Haunting: The Talking Dead
South by Southwest Interactive media conference
Saturday, March 9
5:00PM – 6:00PM
Radisson Town Lake
Town Lake Ballroom
111 E Cesar Chavez
The Death Reference Desk is headed to the 2013 South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive media conference in Austin, Texas.
Doing our best to keep Austin weird!
Death Ref is part of a panel, Platforms for Haunting: The Talking Dead, on death, technology, the dead body and the future relationships of all these things. Same old same old, really. Death Ref John’s Future Cemetery project will also be involved.
Here is the panel’s description so that everyone can see what they’re missing (or seeing– if you’re at SxSW):
The relationship between death and technology is as old as human civilisation; from cenotaph to facebook memorial, industries have been built on our desire to remember and be remembered. Technology now enables us to create spine-chilling immersive experiences; allowing us to embody the worlds of our ancestors, enter our ghost stories and even plan a little post-mortem haunting ourselves. We want to move the conversation beyond discussions of data legacy to ask whether we can engender a new form of history, one that allows us to interact with the dead.
Bringing together experts in human remains, memorialisation and new technology this Panel will explore our relationship with mortality in a digital age. The discussion will draw on recent projects which have used new technology to augment cemeteries, populate historic sites with ghosts of their past and instigate twitter conversations with a 1,610 year old woman.
Updates about SxSW will appear here on the Death Ref blog, on Death Ref’s Facebook page and on the Twitter Feed of Death!
The Twitter feeds to watch are: @DeathRef, #SxSW, #haunting, @FutureCemetery, and @ReactHub
Anyone in Austin should come on up and say howdy!
And then after Death Ref is done with the SxSW panel, we’re all going to the Alamo’s basement to look for our stolen bicycle.