Abstract/Summary

This practice-based PhD in Fine Art by Published Works: Revisiting Genesis: Our Death, Our Dying, Our Digital Afterlife is submitted in three parts: a Contextualising Chapter, a monograph by Mousse Publishing titled How We Die Is How We Live Only More So (2019) and Published Papers (published interviews and text by Ashery, 2015- 2020). All three parts focus largely on Revisiting Genesis, a 12 episode web-series and a feature-length film. This PhD also includes reflections on the film Dying Under Your Eyes (2019), and the exhibitions Revisiting Genesis at the Stanley Pickard Gallery (2016) and Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery at Wellcome Collection (2019-2020), which included a programme of public events. All elements of this publication contribute to the discourse of self and collective care via an exploration of issues specific to queer and outsider death and dying, care, the politics of the digital afterlife and posthumous service technologies, as well as feminist incarceration, socio-political loss, and artistic withdrawal. The Contextualising Chapter establishes insights as well as anchoring the context and methods that underscore the artist web-series Revisiting Genesis, launched in 2016. The video work combines the fictional story of the dying artist Genesis, alongside conversations with artists who have real life-limiting conditions. Digital death, which forms the axis of the multifaceted work, is a term that encompasses the emergent field of posthumous service technologies. These services include Facebook memorialisation; posthumous digital content and legacy agents; wills that protect one’s digital footprint; intellectual and emotional immaterial content; interactive Augmented Reality (AR) gravestones; commercial and creative uses of ashes; and the development of posthumous avatars in various technological forms. The extraction of life and liveness by capitalism, in the form of exploited labour, militarisation, austerity, Big Data and the eradication of planet resources, has newly absorbed the colonisation of death and dying with the promise of digital and technological afterlife: from a posthumous legacy to posthumanism. This research critically examines this emergent condition and its impact on artists’ selfhood, intellectual property, and artistic legacy, with a particular focus on those existing within the precarious margins. The contemporary expectations of artists and cultural workers at large to self-represent on media platforms and to maintain on- and offline visibility at all costs, alongside a push to overproduce work, most often with little economic reward, generates the ripe conditions of artistic and cultural extraction. Within these conditions, chronic illness, mental and physical sickness, and partial withdrawal remain unspoken in fear of losing out on professional opportunities. It is in this context that the ensuing research speaks up, makes visible and expands upon the discourse of self- and collective care. While the science, humanities, and entertainment industries have all been quick to embrace the emergent field of digital death, visual art has been slow to respond: it is within this field that this thesis establishes a new intersectional contribution to knowledge from an explicitly queer, feminist, minor and outsider perspective.