a funeral in cyberspace (may it reach you in the Cosmos!) (2023)
it had been a few weeks after my nani had died. i went over to my uncle's house for a visit. my mother in her usual encouraging way, wanted me to show him what i had created for his mother, and my grandmother.
my uncle and grandfather watched it together. they both grinned, and laughed for a lot of it.
when carl sagan's voice began to play, he just smiled some more.
"you know that this part is my favourite in the whole series?"
i in fact did not know that. i only decided to sample it when making the project.
because the cosmos was always her favourite show!
<3
don't forget me (2023)
thinking about the idea of digital immortality, i wanted to explore grief and the grieving process in “internet graveyards.” when a person dies, the information they have shared on the internet may remain there for years. while social media of the deceased may be deleted, remains of comments, emails, texts and other information is left behind indefinitely. however, their virtual selves can remain, existing in a space used daily by billions of people. it’s a double-edged cyber-sword, a reminder of our loss, but also a thread that keeps us connected. a place to tell stories about loved ones, to laugh, cry, and be comforted. in this way, the internet has also become a space for grief.
diving deeper into digital immortality, the concept makes me think of virtual web mmo’s of my childhood such as club penguin. although club penguin turned off its servers years ago due to a fall in popularity, there is a sad reality that games like club penguin can no longer exist on the internet due to the discontinuation of adobe flash player in 2020. this virtual world made up a large part of the childhoods of many people from my generation. after the website went down, many recreations of it were made in private servers.
using one of these private servers called “new club penguin” i created a penguin avatar, just how i would when i was a little girl, and interacted with those also in the server. i went around asking: “nani?” to see if i would get a response (nani being how i called my grandmother who recently passed away.) in a certain desperation that perhaps i could receive a response, i received many funny interactions from other players. eventually i was banned from asking this question too many times.
in this piece, i wanted to explore my own grief in a virtual recreation of a once virtual world. club penguin feels like a literal graveyard of both the internet, and a certain feeling of innocence, especially as a child who grew up amongst internet culture. this piece explores the lost remains of ourselves and the internet, as a vehicle of healing, and nostalgia.
Girlhood series (2023) (in progress)
exploring the indoctrination of ios makeover apps, meme/internet culture, and post-internet urban mythos. specifically experimenting with pictures of my dead grandmother as a young girl.
"in my defense, nani always knew how weird i was, and that i appropriated images of her in my work all the time.
she would support this."
