Alexis Ibarra Ibarra | Zhouyi Jiang | Laura Amaya De Arco | Yeongkeu Choi

When the physical body dies, the digital body remains: would you like to maintain your digital presence in the world of the living? AfterU is a start-up in the funeral industry that allows you to freely explore the new possibilities of shaping a digital afterlife version of you and your avatars. The implacable and unavoidable regime of death, an existential source of discomfort and base for social organization, is being defied by new technologies. Pushing nature to the limits of the uncertain, technologies that aim to prolong life, achieve immortality, or create a digital afterlife reject the regime of death and the regime of the natural body and the material world. AfterU provides the public with a self-ordering system that playfully utilizes the aesthetics of fast-food chains. The visitors can order digital afterlife products and services for themselves or their loved ones, just like they were banally ordering burgers and fries. Through critical design, absurdity, parody, and dark humour, AfterU explores the chaotic conjunction of the transition regimes and politics of death.

Laura Amaya is from Bucaramanga, Colombia. She is a cultural worker that believes in management as a way of creation. Laura focuses on sustaining, caring, and opening roads for local cultural projects. She has worked on a variety of projects with independent cultural spaces, festivals, digital journalism platforms, and publishing and graphic design, among others.

After spending most of his life building a successful career as a drama producer, he reached the point where the satisfaction from vain success stopped. Now, he plans on living the rest of his life focused on what truly makes him happy.