Post Human Angels: Compassionate Relationships with Inanimate Objects

Design Inspiration and Ideation

Memory, transition and history are invoked through prayerful meditation in sacred places such as graveyards, shrines, and home altars. Shrines are elaborately decorated, and physically and spiritually divided from everyday life. A place for offerings, rituals, devotional prayer and contemplation, these installations share common elements such as offering bowls, textile decorations, flickering lamps, incense and often photographs of family or iconography of religious deities. Common decorations such as orange marigolds and multi colored flags can be found in cultures that seem to have no interaction with each other, but are grounded in a strong belief in the natural and supernatural worlds. 

Posthuman Angels explores the bond between humans and handheld technologies through a ritual shrine installation, which honors the emotional attachment to a device, which mimics a relationship between two human beings. The end of this relationship also creates a sense of loss that requires mourning and remembrance and so the experience of the installation is to mourn the loss of a posthuman companion. 

I began with three controlling ideas: 
  1. Technology provides companionship to fill the lonely void 
  2. Ancestral shrines across cultures commemorate dearly departed
  3. Kami is the Shinto belief that spirit is contained in all living and nonliving things 
My design incorporates symbolic elements and ritual objects that are commonly found in shrines (Japanese Shinto shrines, Chinese ancestor altars, Mexican ofrendas) to invoke memory and transition as a place of meditation on the Shadows of Technologies Past. 

 

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