New Age Memorial Service™
Jacques Verkade & Callan Waldron-Hall
Jacques Verkade & Callan Waldron-Hall
Infinity isn’t what it used to be. It’s better.
Verkade and Waldron-Hall’s installation playfully investigates ideas of digital personae, legacy, fear and consumerism within an imagined product – a purchasable digital afterlife – pushed by a sinister corporation.
Following their 2023 collaborative project, say when you can feel it, which investigated ASMR, digital intimacy and hyper-proximity, New Age Memorial Service™ combines writing – through obituary, elegy, marketing and contractual agreement – with 3D-animated surreal films to explore a speculative world in which we can purchase ‘digital echoes’ – avatars that preserve our physical traits, personalities, hopes and dreams. Fragmented animations reflect hybridised lives, overlapping between real and digital worlds and peering into two customers’ aspirations and worries to present imprecise yet authentic portraits of who they were, both on and offline, prompting us to think: would I pay for this?
The animations have an internet-core, nostalgic aesthetic, seeming both friendly and familiar, but also uncanny and uncomfortable, suggesting that perhaps we might look back too fondly on old memories, and questioning what form that might take were those old memories to stick around – forever.
The installation is framed by inevitable corporate speak, from overly-targeted marketing, to incessantly long and verbose terms and conditions. Language flits between friendly, austere and sardonic; it’s unclear if the corporation’s offer is truly something we should want, or if our afterlives might become another marketable product.
New Age Memorial Service™ invites us to question if, and how, we want to be remembered. It challenges the value of legacy, and asks us to consider our approach to purchasing and consuming.
We can’t wait to spend eternity with you.
Photo Credit: @benjaminnuttal
Exhibition View
Film Stills
