IMMORTALITY & NECROPOLITICS
Melissa Aguilar // 2 0 1 9

ABOUT:

Immortality and Necropolitics + Final Invocation | 2019
Short Essay + Animation | Melissa Aguilar

This project aims to raise questions to achieve a clearer vision about the importance of having agency over our data and digital lives. And in a broader sense, speculate through artistic practices about what kind of future(s) or world(s) do we want to live in?

Taking in count the contemporary socio political context, digital technologies and inequality of human life towards the crisis we call the anthropocene, the project discusses about transhumanism, digital immortality and necropolitics in the text called “Immortality and Necropolitics”.

“Final Invocation” is an animation that represents a digital spell, totem, e-lixir, mantra, or meditation to protect the digital shadow of the artist. It enlists valuable symbols for the artist and speaks of the community that guides and protects her in her real life. By incorporating personal iconography, the mother tongue and voice of the artist, the animation becomes unique for her digital soul, but also invites others to make their own.

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This was one of the claims that Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903) stated when he was one of leaders of the Cosmism movement. Cosmism, was a Russian movement that sat relevant ideas about the possibility of extending life through technological means, in the XX century.

Some artists like Hito Steyerl and Anton Vidokle, consider that the movement might have influenced the contemporary thoughts about transhumanism regarding biotechnology, regenerative technologies and digital spaces.

In a revision of the cosmism movement, during the talk Immortality for All! Steyerl also argues “Immortality of human kind or the improvement of it is always accompanied by this dark undercurrent of extermination, yet it seems to be progressing anyway.” *

She refers here, to the implementation of practices like cryonics, the extension of life, and the abolition of death in contraposition to necropolitics used in this undercurrent of extermination.

Necropolitics are understood as the administration of death through mechanisms of power (technologies of control, death and destruction). According to Achille Mbembe, is linked to the concept of sovereignty, where

The road to immortality will usually imply extermination practices. Some of these practices, are already implied in our new daily routines, through the use of digital technologies and corporate privative media platforms that capture, administer and manipulate our information; information that in many cases is used to limit or privilege some bodies over other ones considered as unwanted, alien or dangerous.
While some people will get insurance to pay for their cosmetic surgery thanks to their remarkable online profiles; migrant populations forced to leave their homes due to wars that they never asked for, will most likely be surveilled to a molecular level and exposed to some kind of confinement (whether it’d be physical, psychological or virtual).***

I think about the migrants in the border of Mexico, and the people in Chile not only being threaten by police, but also by the multiple lenses capturing their biometric information, their voices, and movements in high definition. I think about these data being classified, labeled as unacceptable, inhuman, and inadmissible. Their digital shadows rendered without their consent into material to convince and control the minds of the general public and stain their real identities now stored into cells of databases. Neural networks enabling a division of space into compartments as neo-colonial digital occupation or a not-so-new form of digital racism. ****

Humans are not just brought to existence in the physical plane, but now, also replicated in the virtual world without being asked. Apparently there is no way to not live at least two lives in the contemporary society, but also, it seems that we cant manage either one of them. Our virtual life affects directly our physical life and vice versa.
Can we reclaim our rights of decision in either of one? Can we at least protect a part of our life that will live forever in the virtual world? Is art a way to achieve agency through the use of digital tools and allow us to create a future where we will want to live in?

Facing this landscape, we can argue that immortality stops being a privilege reserved for queens, kings, pharaohs, illuminates and privileged beings with power, and actually becomes an obligation imposed by private tech corps, as a means of controlling civil society, its behaviors and histories.

The servers that store our without giving us access, are data graveyards; spaces that virtually substitute purgatory. Our data, as our digital immortal souls, lives in this new Uroana for as long as the tomb-sarcophagus keepers wish.

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