After-Like

The manipulation of photography has played a large part in how we memorialise our dead; from Victorian era postmortem photography featuring a deceased loved one posing as though alive, to early special-effect techniques superimposing an image of the deceased into a group portrait. Looking back at these approaches they may seem ghoulish now, but as our online lives proliferate so too do our online deaths, and we find the practice continues all the same, though in the digital realm. As people die in real life, their carefully curated online persona can live on, as if haunting and even interacting, through dedicated sites or social networks. Immortal avatars replace real users, and the virtual world becomes a digital afterlife.