ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the disposal of digital artefacts that are reshaping the materialities of death through the case study of digital data funeral workshops, or funerary rituals for paraselves that address cultural anxieties about the afterlife of information. It introduces the notion of network affordance to describe the experience of the network based on ecological and computational parameters of unpredictability as defined by Luciana Parisi in 2013. The chapter explores the main concerns and affordances in materialities of death, embodiment of data, and hybrid memory. The first workshop took place in London in the spring of 2015 called Posthumans n Postburials, Digital Data Funeral Design, at the London College of Communication. The goal of the workshop from a research perspective was to creatively fuel the digital data funeral design process, and to get further insight into how people feel about deletion with respect to digital death.
