ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how digital technologies are being developed and used in and around the funeral industry to offer a new range of innovative goods and services. It focuses on the convergences that are currently emerging between more 'traditional' material memorial forms and exploratory digital forms. These include memorials that link headstones to websites via barcodes and mobile devices, funerals that deploy streaming video or enable remote attendance, and technological innovations like 3D printing that produce special commemorative objects. Digital and digitally enhanced products are now commonplace alongside rows of silk-lined coffins, body hoists, and shiny black hearses at funeral directors' conventions and expositions. While most technologies and services are oriented to those 'at-need', the industry recognises the existence of the 'long tail' that extends from this peak period, and it rises to meet the challenge. While the biological body is a material reality constituted in flesh and bone, the digital isomorph-body is an abstract reality constituted in binary digits.
