Cemetery of forgotten bodies

scrolling through a list of dead

The concept of legacy has been explored across many different disciplines; there has been special emphasis in the social sciences at the intersection of the elderly, death and dying, and family organization. This work hightlights how the creation of a legacy provides a way for people to curate and designate aspects of their life and identity that will be passed on after death. In a concept a legacy is comprised of three related categories-biological legacy, material legacy, and values. In practice, and Individual's legacy is representative of some subset of these larger categories, and is influenced by the relationship between the dying and those who survive. Generally, people desire to be remembered positively and choose to pass on artifacts and information that reinforce that identity. Despite these efforts, the lasting impact of legacy is experienced by the bereaved, who are often tasked with sorting, maintaining, remembering and even dispossessing objects and information left behind. Even for cherished goods, these expectations can be a burden for survivors, who are now responsible for their safe-keeping.

Digital Artifacts as a Social Legacy

Legacy is the meaningful and complex way in which information values, and possessions are passed on to others. As digital systems and information become meanningfully parts of people's everyday and social relationships, it is essential to develop new insights about how technology intersects with legacy and inheritance practices. In the digital realm, there exists a vast collection of work examining personal file and information management. This can cause a feeling of overwhelm in people by the process of managing their digital files. This problem is linked to two-fold reason:
1) computers lack the affordances of the physical world that help us find and organize things;
2) This problem is compounded by the rate at which we produce digital data. Today people create, distribute, and consume vast amounts of digital informations. Future generations will inhabit a world that increasingly uses digital technologies to produce and distribute information, dramatically challenging the material traditions and practices of past generations.

To cope with the difficulty of finding files both online and offline, people have developed a numner of strategies for organizing and managing digital information. These vary according to source, context, and location of the information and include techniques such as printing things out in physical formats, intermittent filing. Into digital folders, creating complex hierarchies of digital folders, and so on. Even so, people produce digital files and data on such a large scale that they are limited in their ability to manage their digital data. The practice of passing down digital information is entwined with serious concerns about providing recipients with the tools to sort through and make sense of increasingly large collections of virstual information, and witholding things that we do not want loved ones to encounter. Interactive systems provide objects and collections through which people construct and express of their identity. Increasingly, this personal content is kept online, in the form of social network accounts, game systems, personal websites, and photo collections, all internet-based resources that people draw on to explore, establish, and express aspects of their identity. Digital information is also kept offline, in memory structures ranging from top level files to typically hidden or ignored information and preferences. Recent work has highlighted how people use these different contexts to convey different aspects of their identities. Clearly , people increasingly desire to pass down valued digital records to future generations alongside material.

i remember hovering over this island
without a name, without any sign of human presence.
no buildings, no roads.
unreachable,
exept for a single lane for aircraft to land.

i had to zoom in very close, sometimes take large distances
to see
view the terrain like a sattelite
visibility/existence is fragile.

i could imagine myself wandering the shores,
wondering, how life might be there.
i never found this island again.

the right
to be
forgotten
__ score

where are you?

I was looking for you

walk with me

What has become of the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe?

Archive of Silence - a crowdsourced archive documenting the erasure and violence against Palestinian advocacy in Germany

whose disappearances do we acknowledge?

> THIS IS THE WAY OUT <

(you can !click! to the archive name to be redirected to the archive website)

CLICK 
HERE

One More Voice - an archive recovering and analysing voices of racialised creators in British colonial records

We Refugees Archive - an archive documenting the experiences and narratives of refugees, highlighting their journeys and contributions across contexts

Oyneg Shabes Archive - an archive preserving the clandestine documentation and testimonies of Jewish life and resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II

Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) - an archive focusing on preserving grassroots perspectives of global Black histories

Colonial Neighbours - an archive focussing on local and colonial community interactions in historical contexts

THE COMPUTERS AND THEIR PLACES SERIES