Category: Blog Entries

Adapted from Camille Barton’s Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024)

• Before you begin, choose a time of the day, and select a destination close to the sea, such as a beach, or a water-front promenade. If you live inland, find a body of water, like a lake, or a river.
• Choose to go alone, or in the company of a trusted friend. Ensure they have the capacity to hold space, and can support you without judgement or desire to minimise your feelings.
• When you are ready, set an intention for the ritual.
• Sit at the water’s edge, on the beach, or on a comfortable surface where you can see the water.
• Breathe calmly and slowly, with long and steady exhales. Place one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly if this feels good.
• Notice the warmth of your hands on your body. Notice the surface beneath you that supports your weight.
• Observe the ebb and flow of the waves, with your eyes, with your ears. Feel the moisture in the air with your skin.
• Pay attention to what arises in you as the waves beckon you to release your feelings.
• Let your grief be heard – let out a moan, a cry, a scream, or hum a tune.
• Notice how the ocean has all the capacity in the world to hold your grief.
• Do this for as long as the ocean feels supportive.
• Close the ritual by sweeping your hands down your body, from your face to your feet. Visualise the energy that needs to be cleared, and let the ocean carry your feelings away.
• Thank yourself (and your friend) for taking the time to tend to your grief.

I am writing this blog about a month after the fellowship has ended. I am sitting in my home office in the Netherlands, rummaging through my field diary and photo collection. I am sitting with my embodied memories of incense burning at temples, grave-sweeping, and movement meditations on grief. As I commit words to paper, I find it incredibly difficult to capture the richness of feelings and thoughts I have had in the research process in Hong Kong. And this blog can only offer a fragmented look into this expansive experience of working through facets of griefwork, death, and AI.

Why did I dedicate myself to this topic, and spend two months of my life meditating on death technologies? A friend was puzzled by my obsession with death, and tactfully commented that perhaps I would have a different (or rather, a more educated) perspective after someone close to me has passed away. Indeed, for most people, this process of learning about grief and death is triggered by the loss of a loved one. For me, it was triggered by the loss of my own sense of identity as I navigated the tough transition into motherhood. It was triggered by the trauma of entering this phase of my life in isolation while the world locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic. Death, in an expanded sense, comes in many forms, as profound losses for individuals as well as for communities, like the death of dreams, desire, or hope. I want to befriend loss and the feelings of disorientation, pain, and depression that accompany it. I want to compost my grief, so that death can become the soil for rebirth.

One of my interviewees who is a veteran grief counsellor suggests that griefwork should not solely be centred around death, but should be a larger exploration of loss. Indeed, one of my key references, Camille Barton’s Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024), points to the ongoing grief of colonisation (or ‘living in the wake’ in Christina Sharpe’s terms), and the grief that arises in social organising and activist movements. In the face of sociopolitical upheavals, as scenes of war and genocide play out everyday on our digital feeds, I wonder if more of us need to learn to navigate loss and hold space for complicated feelings. Our digital devices bring us into proximity with devastating news and images from around the globe. Often with my thumb frozen on my smartphone, I find myself mourning for nameless deaths, silenced voices, and the loss of civil liberties due to political oppression.

Reflecting on my cultural roots in Hong Kong, I wonder about the necessity of griefwork on a larger scale. I myself am a descendant of refugees who escaped the Vietnam war, and have only very recently begun to process the lost possibility of ever truly knowing my family lineage. In another interview with a social worker, our conversation drifted towards the unresolved generational trauma that must have accompanied migrants to Hong Kong as people escaped famine, political turmoil, and war from various parts of Asia. Many untold drownings and deaths took place during these treacherous journeys of escape. How might we grieve for these lives lost, collectively, in retrospect?

Light a candle. In the wake of trauma and suppressed memories, in the ongoing grief of colonial legacies, how do we mourn for the ghosts that haunt our collective unconscious? To process pent-up feelings, you might want to scream into a pillow. You might write a letter and burn it. You might set up an altar of remembrance. A grief ritual could take the form of a wild dance rave, or a quiet forest bath.

The smartness of our digital devices and of AI inventions cannot shield us from the experience of pain, trauma, and broken hearts. There is another chapter to this work that is decidedly non-digital, but does point to the urgency of community-based care rituals in this digital age. Even if digital chatbots become our new favourite counsellors and companions, we need to learn how to process emotions in our bodies through somatic methods and holistic ways. Cognitive therapy can only do so much, when emotional distress is woven into our nervous systems and can be stored in our bodies. We co-regulate not through screens, but in the presence of other people, animals, or with nature. One person’s calm can bring calm to others. A purring cat soothes nerves. An ocean breeze carries away our troubles.

While researching death, several of my interviewees repeated this phrase to me – “it’s never too early”. It’s never too early to think about death, to arrange for a living will, or to think through postmortem data management. It’s never too early to sort out your affairs, resolve conflicts, and seize the chance to do what you truly wish to do with your one wild and precious life.

Perhaps I should add here that it’s also never too early to learn about grief, to learn to hold oneself through difficult transitions in life, through volatile political climates, and to learn to hold space for others for mutual support and care. At the end of the day it is not the technology that matters, but how we live and remember one another, and how we learn to embrace life, endings, and death itself, together.

I am saying goodbye now to this fellowship, and close off this phase of my project. I might brew a cup of motherwort tea. I might hug a tree. Or I might do a little dance, when the moon is high and the night is quiet, and gently move through my feelings.

While working on this project, many people asked if I have seen local film The Last Dance (directed by Anselm Chan, 2024). I felt that I have landed in Hong Kong at just the right cultural moment, as the film, which centres the local deathcare industry, generated renewed interest in the city’s Taoist funeral rites, coffin homes, and cemetries. In a memorable scene, Taoist priest Master Man chides newbie funeral planner Dominic for helping a grieving mother embalm her son using mummification, because it would obstruct the little boy’s possibilities of reincarnation. Without proper rites, the boy’s ghost would be doomed to wander between worlds. One minor detail in the film that stayed with me was the advice that the living should not allow their tears to fall onto the cadaver, because if they do so, the deceased would find it difficult to depart the earthly realms and it would impede their journey to reincarnation. In my research, I also came across similar cultural beliefs in Japan stemming from Buddhism. People believe that if the dead see family members suffering and hurting, they cannot let go of their earthly life and would hesitate to cross over to the other side.

Applying this logic to the creation of digital doubles through griefbots, I began to wonder – how do these technologies fit within a Buddhist or Taoist worldview? Can souls become trapped in this world, if we insist on talking to their digital ‘ghosts’? It seems culturally significant for both the living and the dead to move on and refrain from lingering. I turned my attention to the centrality of letting go and forgetting in Buddhist beliefs in the afterlife. In this worldview, when we die, we travel along the River of forgetting (忘川河) until we reach a bridge to the underworld (奈何橋). At this bridge, an old lady serves a bowl of soup which ensures amnesia. Those who drink this soup (孟婆湯) enter the cycles of reincarnation, unburdened by their previous lives. Those who refuse are banished to remain in the underworld for centuries, swimming in a river of pain, regret, and sorrow.

I meditated on the significance of this bowl of soup, a timeless Buddhist technology of forgetting, in the collective imagination of reincarnation. And I began to question: what if digital technologies are also created from this perspective? What if they are re-oriented around letting go and forgetting?

The truth is, data-driven technology is anything but forgetting. Machines want to record and remember everything possible about the world. Digital afterlife is a data stream where nothing ever gets forgotten, every selfie, every upload, every comment, every online purchase, every emoji ever sent. In digital capitalist belief, when people die, their data must remain profitable, and staying in this digital stream is important to sustain the data extraction model created. After all, grief technology can be sold as subscription-based services, where one would have to pay to continue chatting with a beloved digital ghost.

I started researching what machine forgetting could look like, and ended in the world of machine unlearning. In the emergence of the right to be forgotten, available to specific legal regimes like the EU, data scientists have to figure out how to remove someone’s data upon request. Put simply, AI engineers are not happy about having to delete data. It’s easy enough to remove someone off a database, but AI is trained through machine learning. Machine learning remembers general patterns based on millions of data points. Once learned, it is very difficult to make a machine forget a single user’s data. It is unclear what the impact of each individual’s data is. And if many, many people opt for data deletion, a model needs to be retrained, and the degradation can be exponential. When models collapse because of this, data scientists call it ‘catastrophic unlearning’.

How might we counter this technologically-mediated culture of memory retention that is so incredibly tied up with capitalistic data capture? Is there a future where we move towards unlearning and forgetting instead? I began imagining deletion and forgetting as forms of resistance. Dying with AI seems to suggest that even the very human experience of grief and death cannot escape capitalisation.

Griefwork is oriented around letting go and saying goodbye. In grief counselling, the key focus is to help the living accept the reality of loss, process grief, and transform their relationship to the deceased while beginning a different chapter of life. One of the key things I recognised through the interviews and literature research is that grief counsellors are not huge fans of griefbots, and even warned that perhaps they should come with warning labels that it could increase grief. This is because griefbots are premised upon the semblance of the deceased, and are designed to generate some sense of continuity – you can still text with someone, as if they are still around. This runs counter to the emphasis on transformation – a creation of a new kind of bond that would allow them to stay connected to the deceased while slowly moving on.

In one of the most popular imaginations of grief tech, Netflix series Black Mirror’s Be Right Back episode depicts an isolated Martha talking on the phone constantly with artificially-constructed dead boyfriend Ash, after she uploaded his social media profiles and chat history to a newly available digital service. Immersed in shock and pain after his sudden death, Martha spent most of her days with the digital version of him while ignoring her real-life sister’s concerned messages and calls. This is a real risk that comes with grief technologies – that of isolation and addiction – and a refusal to truly say goodbye.

Digital mourning can turn the grieving process into a solo experience with a screen, when someone needs support and community the most. Traditional rituals, such as wakes, are built around bringing family members together for community-based mourning.

Historically, Buddhist and Taoist funeral rites last 49 days, believed to be the liminal period between lives, until the soul reincarnates in the next life. Prayer and offering ceremonies are arranged during this period, with specific rites at 7-day intervals. In contemporary times, depending on the beliefs and practices of individual families, this process tends to be simplified, and a wake might only last a few days. In traditional village practices in the New Territories, specific reburial rites are carried out 6-7 years after the initial burial, involving processes like bone cleaning and moving the remains to bone urns. Remains might even be buried a third time and moved to a brick-made eternal grave. Even though this practice is dying out, I am fascinated by the extended duration involved in processing dead remains of ancestors. Aside from annual visits to graves and columbaria to pay respects, these rituals suggest a continued relationship that is material in nature, where mourners have to grapple with the physicality of death at marked intervals. Moreover, ancestors are commemorated by name in an altar of ancestral tablets that remain for five generations.

These longer processes of ritual and memorialisation in community allow for ‘contact’ beyond the funeral, and for the family to gather again to organise the reburials. As these traditional practices fade into obscurity, I wonder whether mediated relationships with the dead through digital devices and services fill the lacuna left behind. If traditional practices unfold over decades, what kinds of technology do we truly need in order to facilitate a long, durational process of mourning and healing in community?

In addition, I think about the physical nature of these processes. The sensation of touch is important in the processes of saying goodbye – gently holding the dead in the process of clothing them for the funeral, folding paper offerings of joss paper, burning offerings and lighting incense sticks, the sensations of folding their clothes and putting away their belongings, the warmth of hugs from loved ones in support… in stark contrast to the cold, flattened experience of touching a keyboard, a screen, or a VR controller.

In Meeting You, a documentary produced by South Korean broadcaster Munhwa Broadcasting Corp in 2020, a grieving mother meets her dead child reproduced in VR, pieced together through the concerted effort of 6 studios to create a realistic replica of her voice, body, and mannerisms. Wearing VR gloves that would mimick the sensation of pressure when touching the avatar, the audience watches a devastated mother reaching out to stroke her child’s hair, lamenting the impossibility to hold her once again in her arms. Designed to fulfill the mother’s wish to see her daughter again 3 years after her passing, the experiment is meant to enable a final goodbye, and is co-created with the wishes of the family in mind. How can digital mourning support the otherwise multi-sensorial experience of life itself and the process of saying goodbye?