The Lady and the Reaper

A funny and interesting video on how medicine and technology influence our lives (and deaths)

Watch the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmOrWzblBPs

DEATH REFERENCE DESK

This website is definitely worth checking! http://deathreferencedesk.org/

Morbid Ink: Field Notes on the Human Memorial Tattoo

"Memorial tattooing is, as Marita Sturken discusses the memorialization of the dead, a technology of memory. Yet the tattoo is more than just a representation of the dead. It is a historiographical practice in which the living person seeks to make death intelligible by permanently altering his or her own body. In this way, memorial tattooing not only establishes a new language of intelligibility between the living and the dead, it produces a historical text carried on the historian’s body. A memorial tattoo is an image but it is also (and most importantly) a narrative." from http://observatoryroom.org/2010/05/29/memorial-tattoo/

Life Before Death

http://www.lensculture.com/schels.html

"Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives."

This is a very interesting exhibition and stirred up quite a lot of controversies. What is about corpses that make them unsuitable to be represented? |or is it death that resist representation? Suffering?

"The Family and the Land" by Sally Mann

Dates: 18 June – 19 September 2010
Location: The Photographers’ Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, W1 Admission Free

"The most recent series in the exhibition, What Remains (2000–04) seeks to further connect human contact to the land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at the University of Tennesse Anthropological Research Facility, Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order." (from http://www.photographyblog.com/news/the_family_and_the_land_sally_mann/ and http://bintphotobooks.blogspot.com/2009/08/family-and-land-sally-mann-photography.html )

Check this video: "What Remains", it is a video shot by the photographer in a forensic intitute's garden

"Crossing the digital divide in the other direction" David Frolich - Innovation Interface

The final Innovation Interface talk of the Summer is this Thursday 17^th June at The Science Gallery (Dublin), at 6.30pm and afterwards at Kennedy’s public house. Join us as we welcome David Frohlich, Director of Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey as he discusses "Crossing the digital divide in the other direction: Community-based innovation on the Bespoke Project"

"Death and the Media": CALL FOR PAPERS

Death, Dying and Bereavement (DDB) Study Group

Monday 15^thNovember 2010

send 250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers to Julian Matthews (jpm29@leicester.ac.uk). Deadline for abstract submission is Friday 17^thSeptember 2010.

Death and imagination

EASA, 2010: Crisis and imagination

Maynooth, 24/08/2010–27/08/2010 (W013)

Death and imagination:

creative strategies to embrace and avoid the crisis of death

26 Aug, 2010

Convenors

Chiara Garattini (TRIL Centre - UCD CASL)
John Troyer (University of Bath)

Long Abstract

Creativity and mortality have co-existed since the dawn of time. The social sciences often explain imaginative elaborations on the subject of death as a tool for resolving the "crisis of death" at a personal and social level. Along this line of argument, the crisis of death is more acutely problematic when there is a crisis of imagination. Western social attitudes towards death are said to be characterised by denial and refusal. Technology and medicine are often instrumental in this dilemma as they both allegedly reinforce our reluctance in accepting death as part of life. On the other hand, there is a sort of expectation that non-western societies never "deny" death but instead "face" it in an elaborate and imaginative manner.

In this workshop we want to challenge these concepts and would like instead to explore the following ideas: how the human imagination is used to avoid thinking about death and how individuals constantly think about death through these same creative impulses. This paradoxical phenomenon becomes especially evident in the Western media, where death related themes become everyday entertainment. Our goal is to explore how individuals create concepts of death that do everything but think about death, while at other times embracing all its creative potentialities. Finally, we want to argue that many people deploy both of these "strategies" and that these activities necessarily overlap.

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010/panels.php5?PanelID=590 for the list of papers being presented

[image "Love & Death" by Dr Pat http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickwilken/99369266/ ]