An Immortality 不朽
Film, 02’41’’, 2023
The unabating pervasion of the digital complicates our lived experience and obfuscates our identity. In Being and Time, the German philosopher Heidegger states that the 'meaning of being' lies first and foremost in our human existence's understanding of the meaning of our own existence and our relationship to the world around us. Man is a temporal being, and our temporality is a temporality in which every human being must die, that is, a finite temporality in relation to the infinite universe of time and space.
We routinely construct, then perpetuate, digital facsimiles of ourselves by circulating them around immaterial, pseudo-social networks – we effectively hold residence among a digital landscape. In today's society, however, we are faced with the challenge that crucially, this transposition of ourselves into the digital domain incurs a lossy, distorting transformation; we do not maintain our corporeality but become flattened, mutated reflections. Yet still, in nature of digitally storing and transmitting our memories, thoughts and ideas, perhaps our spirit – our identity -- survives this intermedium transmission, becoming preserved in perpetuity and obtaining a ‘virtual immortality’.
Maybe, through this idea of a ‘virtual immortality’, we have managed to apprehend the ancient cosmological conceptions of the afterlife, whereby one’s spirit and soul – the essence of their self – extends beyond their material body. Resultantly, we’re moved to consider whether the absurdity of digital possibility strengthens or subverts religion and traditional culture more generally. Whether the eternity of the human spirit in the digital world is 'nothingness' or 'reallity'. Do we have the same mobility in time in the virtual digital world as in the real world? If time is infinite, does the meaning of death change for human beings? With the development of technology, what does " being and time" mean for human beings when everything we have, such as memories, thought patterns, perceptions, etc., can exist in a virtual world and be 'immortalized'?
We routinely construct, then perpetuate, digital facsimiles of ourselves by circulating them around immaterial, pseudo-social networks – we effectively hold residence among a digital landscape. In today's society, however, we are faced with the challenge that crucially, this transposition of ourselves into the digital domain incurs a lossy, distorting transformation; we do not maintain our corporeality but become flattened, mutated reflections. Yet still, in nature of digitally storing and transmitting our memories, thoughts and ideas, perhaps our spirit – our identity -- survives this intermedium transmission, becoming preserved in perpetuity and obtaining a ‘virtual immortality’.
Maybe, through this idea of a ‘virtual immortality’, we have managed to apprehend the ancient cosmological conceptions of the afterlife, whereby one’s spirit and soul – the essence of their self – extends beyond their material body. Resultantly, we’re moved to consider whether the absurdity of digital possibility strengthens or subverts religion and traditional culture more generally. Whether the eternity of the human spirit in the digital world is 'nothingness' or 'reallity'. Do we have the same mobility in time in the virtual digital world as in the real world? If time is infinite, does the meaning of death change for human beings? With the development of technology, what does " being and time" mean for human beings when everything we have, such as memories, thought patterns, perceptions, etc., can exist in a virtual world and be 'immortalized'?
24–09–2024