Episode 1: The Slideshow, The Phone Call
Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis (2016) takes the form of an online series in twelve episodes and a full-length film. While the online series is presented on Kunsthall Trondheim’s website during the exhibition period of the group exhibition Who Wants to Live Forever?, the full-length film can be seen in the exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim.
Revisiting Genesis mixes fictional dialogues and real-life interviews with people who have life-limiting conditions. The work explores digital and emerging technologies of dying, social networks, care, and feminist reincarnations of women artists.
Full cast and thank you list
Lyrics, ”Episode 12: Prayer, Aeralist”
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Oreet Ashery’s work follows among others two nurses as they meet people with real-life limiting conditions. The work revolves around the question of how the film’s protagonists wish to be manifested digitally post-mortem. The commercialisation of death is a relatively new industry. There are companies that offer, for example, online services for storing digital assets in safe online vaults, creating slide shows of photographs from a person’s life, which can be activated through a QR code on the headstone, or creating personal and interactive avatars. The boundaries between fiction and reality in Revisiting Genesis are not clear: Whereas some characters perform themselves, others act as fictitious. Some follow a script whereas others improvise, however all the digital services featured in this film are actual, existing commercial services. As well as broaching subjects such as friendship, care and working life, Ashery’s film offers insight into ways in which modern digital technology is a gateway to an afterlife, challenging our fundamental understanding of death: through our data we can live forever. Through the diversity of the film’s characters – in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, age and language – light is shed on the central question: who has access to this digital immortality, why is it important? Should immortality be an exclusive benefit for the privileged only?
Revisiting Genesis (2016), video still. One-channel film and online series of 12 episodes, 95’21”. Courtesy the artist