Datamnatio memoriae, the anti-memorial

Sometimes, it is cheering to remember things have ceased to exist in your life.
This is the idea behind the Anti-memorial for the pieces from the anthropocene, a personal monument to remind yourself of the awful aspects of your anthropocenic life, in place of the positive ones.

An anti-memorial is about “performative uncommemoration”. Building a shrine for a piece of the anthropocene, such as digital data for example, can pursue two ambitions:
– Accelerating the disappearance of this existing piece by declaring it gone,
– Avoiding misplaced nostalgia about this already disappeared piece.
Rather than sounding like a modern curse, the anti-memorial is an invitation to think about what could or have been earned because we lost some pieces of our anthropocenic life.

In this story, Sarah has been using the kit from Anti-memorial Initiative to build her own “Datamnatio memoriae”, a shrine to uncommemorate her deleted Facebook profile and remember all the good reasons of having these data erased forever.