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∞ “Immersive Afterlives: Streaming Spectres H2.O in Hong Kong’s Online “Seameteries”” (pdf) – Marie Lecuyer, 2022
Abstract:This article is part ethnographic, part fiction, and seeks to sound out the under-water-digital-commons of resting places for the dead in Hong Kong. It traces the emergence of “seameteries” occurring within the archipelago’s saturated urban space, which involves marine zones dedicated to the scattering of ashes and web platforms on which one can “surf” to visit the dead. The article asks: how do sea burials, analog and digital, but more particularly digital ones here, potentially reconfigure ways of caring for the dead? I suggest that sea burials potentially “spectralize” ancestors by preventing them from moving passed the critical state of “gui2,” or ghost in Cantonese. After tracing the modalities by which the dead dis/appear among the living, the last part is a proposition to live-stream human-coral holobiomes in order to resurrect the dead space of contemporary watery media.
Marie Lecuyer is a PhD candidate in social and cultural analysis at Concordia University in Montreal, and a visiting fellow at the School of Creative Media, City University, Hong Kong (2021). Her doctoral dissertation, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, examines the oceanic turn of funerary rites in Hong Kong archipelago. At the crossroads of anthropology and media studies, her research among spectres employs a multi-site and multimedia methodology. Before focusing on the human dead, her previous research focused on plastic waste’s haunting capacity, in urban and oceanic environments.
∞ “Sonorous Archipelaghost” – The Hungry Ghosts, 2022
The Hungry Ghosts: a collective of holographers and holosound makers, consultants in underworld relations and regular cemetery drifters.
ALIENOCENE 