Video Out

Digital Traces

Digital Traces explores the intimate intertwinings of technology with death, gently investigating its past(s), present(s), and future(s).

Death is something that all beings experience, perhaps the one universal thing that unites all living things: across species, structures, and space. And yet, there remains a public hesitancy to engage with it, an implicit framing of death as something to approach as a tragedy, only ever accepted as the inevitable consequence of old age. At the same time, we are surrounded by death, especially as news of violence, illness, and conflict spreads within the digitalised and globalised world with increasing immediacy. The ever-relevant question of death has thus entered into a new realm of understanding, a realm that is normal for younger generations of people whose formative years are entwined with the way that digital platforms encourage or restrict experimentation, mutual support, and personal expression. This normality means that death is entering a new paradigm of being felt, of being experienced, of being meaningful — and it is this paradigm that the film seeks to understand.