⁺‧₊˚‧ ꒰ა will you be with me in the afterlife? ໒꒱ ‧˚₊‧⁺ invokes the cyber-spiritual, framing the computational system and its manifestations as a form of architecture that facilitates “rituals”. Like a computational ouija board, “the computer” (the server, the website, the application, the internet, etc.) suppose it as a locus, a place of containment, enclosing the incorporeal, as a sort of archive of objects, ideas, voices, and thoughts. Traces of bodies, aptly named a  “digital footprint”, feel simultaneously omnipresent and ephemeral, as if begging to reckon with the limits of the physical reality of the digital space.

Borrowing from Howard Kainz’s parallels of computational mechanisms and Medieval divine metaphysics of spirits, in the age of an internet where we have unmitigated access to a performance of bodies and selves, how can an afterlife after the internet be imagined? Existing as remnants on (defunct) websites, instant messaging boards, forums, or archived posts, what becomes of the life online, and necromantic half-life that remains, is downloadable, replicable and processed on and through digi-metaphysical means?

The work takes the form of a single-channel video and projection, with a spirit box (as used in paranormal investigations) continuously playing on loop. The video is a step-by-step guide leading the viewer through how to perform a seance, while the spirit box remains on to capture any “disembodied voice” that may manifest. The projection of gifs appears on top of a magic circle (taken from the Wheel of Fortune tarot card) on the floor, surrounded by the letters a to z, “hello”, “goodbye”, “yes”, and “no” in binary, functioning as a large ouija (mother) board, activating the seance. It takes its visual sensibilities from a bygone form of the internet, drawing from websites and personal blog culture of the 2000s (as seen on hosting sites such as GeoCities).

“It will live on the internet forever”. The once-common adage of digital permanence promised virtual immortality, yet the digital gardens of broken links and deleted ephemera function closer to a veritable graveyard, a shrinking repository of data subsumed by the growing desire for space on a server.  

This work was made with the support of the Factory Media Centre as part of the 2025 &NOW Production Residency and Scholarship.