by Richard Ledes



If we ask ourselves how the Web can be a place of affect and feeling, of emotions, then we might find some answers by checking out some of the sites memorializing the dead. A few of these, such as World Wide Cemetery (http://www.worldgardens.com/MAA002.htm) and the Virtual Pet Cemetery (http://www.lavamind.com/pet.html) can actually be quite moving for what they say about our experiences of loss. Maybe someday--soon--someone will try to sell you a cemetery plot on the Web, with your choice (depending on your ability to pay) of tasteful casket-graphics. Loved ones, lost websurfers, and cyber-necrophiliacs downloading your iconic remains will hear the appropriate organ-music piped through their mega-speakers. For the moment, a few free services are currently available that possess a much sought-after quality: emotional impact. Sex and death are often paired, but on the Web--and just about everywhere else--it is sex and not death that gets talked about. This would appear to be as it should be; after all, humans are generally thought to pursue sex and to flee death. Yet, anyone wanting to have a better command of Web-aesthetics, Web-history and Web-directions might do well to temporarily hold in abeyance their usual ordering of things and to spend a little time pondering love's evil twin.

Death has been on intimate terms with the Web from its very creation; after all, the Internet grew out of the desire to have the data on military computers escape the mega-death of nuclear war. On an even profounder level--one that persists even as the Web leaves behind its Cold War roots--here is the foundation of the Web in "data." A philologist might helpfully point out that the word "data" is derived from the past tense of the Latin verb to "give." As such, the Web is a present built upon a reordering of the past. This relation of the Web to data has precedents in earlier moments of modernity, when the management of data experienced rapid growth--although dwarfed by its growth in our own time. In the nineteenth century, the great French photographer Felix Nadar intuitively captured one of these earlier epochal moments in the history of data; when Haussmann had just recently transformed Paris by giving it its boulevards, Nadar showed off his newly patented use of artificial light by photographing the Paris sewers and catacombs. Here were bones that had been removed from cemeteries eliminated by the reconstructing of Paris. Bones that had until recently been arranged in skeletons, and accordingly labeled with--at minimum--the deceased individual's name and dates of birth and death, were now arranged according to type. In Nadar's photos, the massive numbers of each type of bone are stacked with sublime similarity one to another. They resemble mass-produced commodities from the same era in the way they were displayed in windows of fashionable stores along Haussmann's boulevards. The Web can arguably be viewed as appearing at another epochal moment in the history of data, and, by extension, the history of death. Lest this all sound too gloomy, let us ask, what, then, gives the Web its life? The short answer might be: interactivity. Each website represents a new ordering of data--some websites more than others of course. These clusters, and our clustering of these clusters, challenge death by reordering and disordering the past--data. They present what is inherently inert in a way that can make us think and act. Nadar may have been photographing the relation of data to death, as it was embodied in the underground, but he was also photographing how life mobilized the past, rather than being immobilized by it. Attempts to catalogue the Web are notoriously imperfect. That persistent margin of imperfection may be the culprit life. The most visited sites, such as Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) and Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/), can be considered locations where knowledge is not only catalogued but where it also constantly escapes categorization, defeating what would otherwise be our paradoxically successful pursuit of death.

Timothy Leary has--until recently--been "dying on the Web" for some time now, publishing a monthly account of his experience of his own mortal encounter with cancer (http://leary.com/home/Enter.html). "I am developing methods and technologies to delay the ultimate onset of pain, coma, helplessness, and indignity which await," reports Leary. "Hi-Tech Designer Dying is occupying most of my time." Despite the difficulties of his situation that he chronicled, he was anything but gloomy, adding "My zippy hot rodwheel-chair rules the road."

What are perhaps slightly more traditional approaches to death can be found at sites offering burial plots on the Web: beside the one already mentioned, these include a section of DeathNET (http://www.islandnet.com/~deathnet/). The rest of DeathNet is devoted to providing information concerning death. At the World Wide Cemetery, the visitor selects a burial plot to visit; the time it takes for an image of the deceased to download here takes on the significance of the kind of slow-motion often associated with mourning. What is striking is how--in the absence of a body--the visitor is made aware that the person whose image is being viewed is dead. The image is no more "dead" than any other image that can be found on the Web, yet these sites provide a context that may shift the way we experience the image. Data, of course, is key: a date of birth and a date when the file was closed, so to speak. In a way these sites take advantage of our own experience of death as reducing a person to data, as the Vietnam memorial in Washington works, in part, by the impact of recognizing a name in an alphabetical list. What is most striking about these sites is how many of those resting in peace died many years ago--a great number even before the Web existed. One can only conclude that the Web may also facilitate acts of mourning and remembering world-wide. The fact that bodies are absent from cyberspace has often been mentioned in connection to possibilities of sexual experimentation; this absence of bodies may also play a role in the capacity for the Web to offer a final resting place. In certain cases, the absence of the body in cyberspace may mimic the absence of a body that can be buried in the ground. In this way, the emergence of the Web as a place of burial does indeed recall its history: one of the earliest and most often repeated details reported about the first use of atomic weapons was that the bodies of the victims were disintegrated. One art project that appears to utilize this double absence is Infinity City (http://www.artswire.org/community/arose/infcty.html) . Constructed by artists Ann Rosenthal and Stephen Moore, Infinity City commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic device on July 16. A site that proposes a connection between the obsessiveness of serial killers and society's obsession with data is provided by artist Max Frazee (http://Zero.Tolerance.org/max/cat.htm). A macabre and often tasteless collection of URLs regarding death is available at Dark Side of the Web (http://www.cascade.net:80/dceme.html). Perhaps the most emblematic proof of the uncanny relation of death to the Web is provided by certain works of Andy Warhol (http://www.clpgh.org/warhol/). These deal with death and immortality by evoking such transcendental figures of popular culture as Marilyn Monroe. These works appear to illuminate a certain affinity between the Web and questions of death and immortality. The absence of the body is still something we frequently equate with death; these websites remind us that, when it comes to the much-discussed absence of the body in cyberspace, death is still part of the equation.



© Richard Ledes 1996