grief









	How to Accommodate Grief in Your Life LMFS 2016 voice: Dead Horsley Happiness stained. All over. As the figure spins a voice speaks: to it, to us, to you. A super-egoic breaching of the echo-chamber. A reading of poetry invoking networked pathologies, image dumps, blockaded communication networks. An imagist and splenetic journey through griefing as counter-protocol in our contemporary digital agora. This work explores laterally the subcultural phenomenon of griefing within online culture, posing modes of image-gathering that grief play has generated in the now ‘dead end’ world of Second Life, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environment. Using screen capture alongside photogrammetry we documented a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs).

	Installed at:



	Overpr!nt: agitate activate La Musée: Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image imprimée, La Louvière, Belgium 28 April - 16 September 2018 We are in a time where institutionalized indignations flourish, particularly in the field of contemporary creation. The institution seemingly embrace great causes (refugees’ crisis, economic crisis, ecological crisis, revolutions and uprisings) in order to, (un)consciously, void them of meaning. OVERPR!NT is not just another call to arms, but rather a reflection - retrospective and prospective, multiple and contradictory - on the relevance of the medium of print in the articulation and diffusion on alternative ways of thinking.


	Publication:



	How to accommodate grief in your life Louisa Minkin and Francis Summers Philosophy of Photography Volume 7 Issue 1-2 October 2016 This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here.