E-Flux

Digital ghosts and the afterlives of data

Works explore how deleted, abandoned, or residual data continue to shape identity and memory.

[ e-flux ]

Experiments in Eternity: Erkki Kurenniemi

Digital immortality projects (Replika, Eternime, 2045) and Kurenniemi’s lifelong archive are framed as attempts to replace lived subjectivity with data-driven simulation, extending life-logging into a speculative “death-logging” horizon where identity becomes retrievable media. Against techno-utopianism, Heidegger’s being-towards-death and Bergson’s durée ground a critique: computation can recombine behavior and memory but cannot reproduce existential experience as temporal finitude, leaving Kurenniemi’s cybernetic vision suspended between avant-garde experimentation and melancholic recognition of what simulation structurally lacks.

[ e-flux ]

[ KADIST ]

2045 – The Death of Ray Kurzweil (The Unmanned series)

A fictional documentary reframes Kurzweil’s singularity as a techno-political program of immortality and succession, staging 2045 as the moment when human death is “solved” through machinic self-generation and genealogical substitution. By delegating vision to drones and preprogrammed cameras, the work advances a posthuman cinema that critiques technological acceleration and its capitalist eschatology, using uninhabited/abandoned sites to register the eerie displacement of bodies, agency, and historical time.

[ KADIST ]

Lifting Barbells

Digital traces (GPS routes, cardiographic metrics, Google Maps) are staged against intimate grief to expose a contemporary ontology in which screen-based data claims evidentiary authority while affective experience is rendered epistemically unstable. By fusing autobiographical narrative with networked interfaces (AR/VR, face-swap, surveillance-like tracking), the work critiques how technological mediation reorganizes reality, producing confusion and pressure at the threshold between the real and the artificial, life and death.

[ KADIST ]

[ e-flux ]

XYZT

A transnational experiment in embodied telepresence collapses Tehran, Miami, Wisconsin, and mythic geographies into a single networked sensorium, where GPS, bracelets, and time-slips render identity as a portable interface rather than a stable origin. By staging jinn intervention, videogame realism, and commodified religious ritual as competing regimes of the real, the narrative critiques techno-capitalist mediation and cultural translation as forces that both expand mobility and precipitate disorientation, faith-loss, and the uncanny persistence of power across borders.

[ e-flux ]