Goodnight Sweetheart is an art-led enquiry that investigates how the digital ‘medium’ is redefining our relationship to memory. The project has resulted in publications, exhibitions, performances and workshops internationally, reaching audiences of over 20 000. The project explores the interdependence of memory and digital data through rituals of erasure, or digital data funerals. These symbolic acts of erasure points to the quasi impossibility of truly deleting data online and in doing so, to its materiality. These rituals also reimagine the biopolitical relationship to “data”, and as such address the entanglements of body, memory and data. By creating funerals for our data, these ceremonies help us understand our new relationship to data and to define what and how such rituals may be useful.

Goodnight Sweetheart was born through an artist residency at Eastern Bloc in Montreal, Canada in 2015. It has continued and further developed through a series of exhibitions (Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2020), ISEA (South Korea, 2019), Stephen Lawrence Gallery (United Kingdom, 2018), esc medien kunst labor (Austria, 2017), Austrian Cultural Forum (United Kingdom, 2017), Never Apart & Centre des arts de Shawinigan (Canada, 2017), Connecting Spaces (Hong Kong, 2015), ADA Mesh Cities (New Zealand, 2015)), workshops (Kunstraum Graz, 2017, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015, University of the Arts London, 2015, City University of Hong Kong, 2015), publications (book chapters published by: Routledge 2019, Bloomsbury, 2018, Open Humanities Press 2017, Autonomedia, 2016, APRJA, 2015), conference presentations (King’s College London (2017), IT University of Copenhagen (2016), Kingston University (2015), Transmediale (2015)), and funded by the Canada Art Council, the Wellcome Trust, the University of Melbourne (Digital Commemoration research group), and the ACC Asia Culture Center (Gwanju, South Korea).

Digital Data funerals were a novel concept (ritual) proposed by the artist in 2015 which have become a matter of concern internationally. The evolving practice has built upon the various exhibitions, workshops, and publications to call attention to the materiality of data and networks, and to thinking through possible new rituals to accommodate this aspect of our digital selves. It has been featured in media outlets such as Radio Canada, Vice magazine, Asia Art Pacific and Die Referentin.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29440