Artistic Fellowship at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Spring 2025
with thanks to the social workers, grief counsellors, and other death professionals who have kindly participated in my interviews
There has been an age-old desire to transcend death through various technologies. With AI, it seems like we are one step closer to digital immortality through creating digital doubles of ourselves who can live forever online. Grief technologies have come onto the market in recent years, with various artists, individuals, and companies experimenting with training chatbots from our conversation and email data to create what they call griefbots. You can chat with the semblance of your loved ones even after they are gone. You can scan your bodies and motion capture to create digital avatars for the metaverse. Using as little as 1 minute, someone’s voice can be cloned. Amazon Prime TV series Upload (2020- ) imagines that in the future, we can all scan our brains and live our digital afterlives in the metaverse, where loved ones can visit via VR.
Science fiction tales aside, grief technologies have arrived on the market. According to one major US company, You, Only Virtual, these technologies bring meaningful healing, comfort, and continuity. Their griefbots are supposed to capture the distinct bond you share with people special to you – they promise to keep the ‘essence of your relationships alive’, and keep someone’s legacy intact through technology.
In my fellowship at CUHK, I studied the idea of using such technologies to assist with grieving processes in the culturally-situated context of Hong Kong. As a decolonial artist-scholar, my work decentres white-capitalist tech by turning to AI’s multicultural contexts. I tailored the project specifically towards reimagination of AI through local culture, against universalised visions of AI tech. Technological revolutions often seem to have universal applications – from electricity to manufacturing, communication networks to computers, internet to AI – but a closer look at culture often opens other avenues for critical evaluation and designs that are responsive to local needs.
To understand the context in which death and grief technologies might be deployed, I studied the death, ritual, and grieving culture in Hong Kong through literature research and fieldwork. My blog posts detailing my experience can be read below:
EVELYN WAN 