Clients and Servers, Common Accounts

Because life is online, so is death. Files, photos, profiles—digital remains—left behind by the deceased are newfound artifacts for mourning and memorial. Social media platforms and the infrastructures that house them have become cemeteries and funeral homes: hosts to both formal gatherings and casual remembrance. The near magical symbolism of the ‘cloud,’ resonant with notions of spiritual disembodiment and ascent to another realm, suggests an otherworldliness to online death akin to that proposed by religion. This affirms the perceptual mysticism of novel technology, or what Mayte Gómez Molina describes as the “moment in which consciousness reaches its horizon and cannot see beyond it.”

Clients and Servers examines funerals, contemporary and historical, that rehearse the networked distribution of bereavement enabled by the online today. It identifies a proto-virtual exemplar in the 1665 funerary apparato of Philip IV—the monarch of Spain whose own demise coincides with the empire’s decline. His funeral was global in its reach and set in motion the construction of elaborate catafalques in the urban centers of the empire, including Madrid, Milan, Naples, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Mexico City, and Lima.

Baroque funeral apparati, from the Italian apparecchio for “instrument” or “set,” materialized architectural translations of the funeral pyre of antiquity. Often covered in candles, catafalques were tiered structures with biographic and mythic iconographic programs grounded in terrestrial symbols that gave way to the divine in their upper registers.

Clients and Servers proposes an installation centered around a cardboard facsimile of Philip IV’s Naples catafalque, designed by royal engineer Francesco Antionio Picchiatti. The cardboard catafalque embodies the distributed, logistical ethic of the emperor’s multinational memorial program and frames a series of conceptual aperture shifts between domains physical and cosmic.