Beyond Endings

How might the dynamics of death culture change in the future?

Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman, wrote in 1789 that only two things are certain in this world: death and taxes. While taxes haven’t changed much since then, how we experience, understand, deal with and try to control death is changing. We first began creating rituals around death and the afterlife thousands of years ago. Now and in the future, we’re using new tools and ways of thinking to approach a part of life that’s always been certain. These new approaches might seem strange at first, but in most cases they are updated versions of age-old practices, beliefs and desires. 

In this exhibit we want to explore, through speculative design, how the ways we understand and approach death may evolve in the future. We wanted this gallery to encompass physical, social, economic, and technological aspects. In addition, touching on approaches to delaying or avoiding death, and framings of memory, legacy, grief and the afterlife. What new products or services may arise to allow us to extend beyond a traditional ending? What are the opportunities for life extension, reanimation or digitisation? And what types of ethical questions do these options raise? 

In our 2125 world, the three departments of Eterna.Life represent different aspects of future products and services. This includes uploading digital consciousness, cloning and cryonic reanimation. Many of these ideas we’d thought were on the edge of the speculative boundary are already the focus of a swathe of death tech start-ups.  

In each of the three departments there are representatives to conduct the interviews. In Organics you meet Evelyn Carter, Reanimation Team Leader and Cryonics Specialist . She is a ‘true believer’ in the Eterna.Life mission to make every ending a new beginning. She navigates her field with a dedication to technical excellence and high ethical standards. In Quantum sits Joi, a Virtual Memory Archivist, who is a creative and enthusiastic but often distracted employee of Eterna.Life. During a conversation with her you may learn she’s inclined to overshare. She is the person you may hear about the more ethically questionable details and controversies of working at Eterna.Life. The last stage of the job interview is conducted by Gene, a long-time employee of Eterna.Life. Gene is increasingly disillusioned with the direction Eterna.Life has taken into the digital realm. He believes that the integrity of the human body is the key to life extension. According to Gene, the digital copies managed in the Quantum department are a poor imitation of a good life well lived.

These representatives are AI-powered digital avatars, MetaHumans. These avatar employees of Eterna.Life are powered by large language model chatbot (Open AI’s ChatGPT) with MetaHuman, a platform used to create and animate fully customiszable digital humans for Unreal Engine. MetaHumans are animated using Audio2Face. This is AI software from NVIDIA that generates facial animations and lip syncing driven by an audio source. Each character’s narrative is driven using a node-based structure to guide the visitor through the job interview experience. The conversations they carry out with the job interview candidate creates an opportunity to interrogate the ethical issues surrounding many of these life-extension methods.

The explosion of generative AI tools since ChatGPT launched in 2022 has been extraordinary, and it’s only now that these are beginning to make their way into museum experiences. In early 2024, Musée d’Orsay incorporated an AI- powered exhibit. It allowed visitors to speak into a microphone and converse with Vincent van Gough, with the AI model trained on his letters. Interestingly, one of the most frequently asked questions of the avatar was not about his art but about his choice to end his life.