Digital data funerals

This chapter considers the disposal of digital artefacts that are reshaping the materialities of death through the case study of digital data funeral workshops. It addresses the gap in technological development, governmental and corporate privacy policy, and socialised mourning related to network materiality. The artistic practice described explores how memory and residues of the dead are entangled in the case of digital data and its afterlife. Ultimately, it investigates how memory and technical objects are entangled in the context of networked data archiving, and the potential of erasure as a method of inquiry towards the exploration of this theme.