2013 - The Cloud of Resilience

The Cloud of Resilience is both a database where global mortality rates can be visualized and explored and a virtual platform for the keeping and remembering of the dead. Nearly 100 people die every minute. That makes almost 2 deaths per second. Geolocated and offset according to time, such data would generate a point-cloud of varying densities, revealing the outlines of the most populated places on earth. If we apply a death-rate filter to a given instant in history, we could visualize war, starvation, pandemics or other mass fatalities taking place in the timeframe selected. 

No matter where or when or how, the precise location of a person’s death in space and time will create a point: the deceased person’s unique coordinates in The Cloud of Resilience.Each registered death data-point also becomes a node of remembrance, an infinitely particular niche to which messages, presents, photographs, tributes, memorials, elegiacs, odes can be uploaded and shared with others, depending on the settings established either by the user prior to his/her death or by an authorized post-mortem delegate. 

Since we cannot relate to the experiences of the deceased, remembrance is our way of dealing with grief, as it recalls memories from life. When we read obituaries, we read about life. Short paragraphs, symbols, dates and photographs together help to create an idea of who that person was -- and who he or she still is, in the memories of friends and family. 

As an alternative or supplemental event to already existing ceremonies, virtual ceremonies take place at an individual’s coordinates in the Cloud of Resilience. These virtual funereal events promise to fundamentally transform the practices through which the living join together to mourn and commemorate the dead. They are especially necessary in a time in history in which a deceased person’s potential mourners may be spread across the globe, more meaningfully connected by virtual rather than physical ties. This will be the interface to access billions of stories archived online, in the Cloud of Resilience.