Digital Afterlife

In January 2025, I gave a one-week workshop at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw on the topic of Digital Afterlife.

We discussed how emerging technologies like AI, LLMs, and digital twins can challenge our understanding of loss, grief, memory, or immortality as well as ownership, consent, dependence, and ethics. What does it mean to preserve a person digitally? What can go well, and what can go wrong? And what happens when ethics and consent clash with technological possibilities?

Through the process of Critical and Speculative design, Material prototyping, Odd Interactions, Storytelling, and Undesigning, students developed their final concepts that explored the ideas of what an AI guide in the afterlife could look like and what would they say (Photos 1 and 2, authors: Maryia, Kristina, Anastasiya), a game that decides whether people are worthy of entering the digital afterlife (Photos 3 and 4, authors: Hanna and Natalia), a way to transcend into a digital world as a way to escape the dying Earth (Photos 5 and 6, authors: Yahor, Anna, and Melaniya), how we can keep the sensory connections to our pets even after they die (Photos 7 and 8, authors: Sofiia, Varvara, and Aliaksandra), and companies exploiting deaths of celebrities to keep their fans base engaged and paying subscriptions (Photos 9 and 10, authors: Kira, Kateryna, Kinga, and Maryia).