Vigil: Death & the Afterlife - Paneltalk hosted by Isabella Greenwood

Key words: death, mortality, afterlife, dying, decay, corpse, absence, transformation, archetypes, symbolism, liminality, transmutation, consciousness, memory, ephemeral, collective unconscious, rituals, vigils, mourning, cultural practices, ethics, fear, digital realm, digital afterlife, social media, archives, holograms, internet memorials, data exploitation, near-death experiences (NDE), DMT, ayahuasca, hallucinations, neuroscience.

Featured panelists: Isabella Greenwood, Doron Beuns, Bob Coppes, Anna de Waal & Charles Jimenez.

IG: Hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. We're really excited to have you all. So glad that you've come to the show. Yeah, we're really excited to give this panel discussion today in conjunction to the show. As you know, the show is called vigil, and it really explores themes of death and the afterlife. When I was first kind of coming up with this concept as the curator of the show and then later developing it with co-curator Doron, we were really thinking about, I suppose, the way that death is often rendered taboo and relegated to the margins of society, and I think ultimately it's such a rich such a rich space and death and corpse and to hold such deep, archetypal and symbolic and they're such deeply charged sites that ultimately, I suppose, have made it important, by the way that they represent absence death and corpse have so much sort of power and symbolic weight, because they ultimately signify the absence of a life that was lost. And so really delving into the subject is sort of delving into the space of of absence, of what remains, of what's passed over, of what we might lose and of what continues. And that, again, was really a thing that we wanted to explore within the show. So, for example, you know, when we die, materialists would argue that life, unconsciousness does not go on. But really, it's far more interesting to think about death as this sort of, I suppose, kind of like pivot to into a new realm and sort of explore ways in which the body is just one part of our existence and one part of our journey, and something continues, and something continues on, whether that's the soul or, you know, consciousness. And these are all kinds of things that we will not know the answer of, and we definitely won't figure out tonight. But though that is important things to consider for at the end of the day, that is something that we will all experience in a myriad of ways, whether it's personally or symbolically or archetypically, we all have deep understandings of what death might mean for us, and part of this show is exploring what death might mean through sort of more creative and artistic lens. On this panel because we wanted to talk further as well as what death might mean from each of the perspectives of our wonderful panelists. So I will first introduce each of the panelists, and then we will kind of delve into conversation surrounding these themes and the show as well. And then there'll be opportunities at the end to put any kind of questions that any of you might have. So we start with Doron Beuns. Doron is co-curator of the show, so we've worked together very closely on kind of bringing the show to life. Doron is also a really incredible artists. So Dorons work is in the third realm of the show, a really exceptional piece, which we will definitely talk about in the discussion at some point. If you haven't yet located Doron's work, please do so at some point and some of the things that Doron's practice focuses around are types of transgression, liminal realms, social events and distorted realities, and the way that all these types of different aspects might be like, and then we have Bob Coppes. Bob Coppes is an Amsterdam based near death experience researcher, author and lecturer. Bob's work, including his influential book, The Essence of Near Death Experiences, An Insight Beyond Death, speaks to the parallels and differences between religion and near death experiences. Bob's research has helped shape the broader conversation around consciousness, the nature of our existence, and through his lectures and publications and research Bob continues to offer valuable insights into the transformative effects of near death experiences. So Bob is going to provide a really interesting perspective, specifically from all of his incredible work with people that have clinically died and had really powerful cognitive experiences that have lived on to sort of tell their story and how being so close to death has completely impacted their way of living and their way of seeing the world. So thank you, Bob as well. And then we have Anna de Waal. Anna de Waal is a researcher, editor and writer who has specialisation in dreaming and the language of the dream. A recent graduate at Cambridge, of the background of literature. Anna's work delves into the possibilities of dreamscapes intersecting with the symbolisms of darkness and the traumatised unconscious. Her ongoing research examines dream phenomena in literature alongside building an archive of dream writings have archived during the panel discussion. Her arts magazine who's left the new life is exceptional. Application definitely speaks to the uncanny, pointed and darker aspects of government and human existence. So that is Anna de Waal, thank you so much for being here. And then we have the wonderful Charles. We're so happy to have Charles here. They are really incredible London based performance artist and through films and performances, Charles creates dream like narratives, through wonderful and through dialects, exploring the intersections between the corporeal and outbound experiences rooted in post humanism, dreamscapes and transformation we're so lucky to have Charles tonight, and they're going to do a wonderful performance for us all later, and they've been working very hard on, I won't speak more to this or I'll spoil the surprise support this to ruin the surprise but various extensions of their own body, let's say, which will be incorporated into the performance. And so Charles will definitely offer us a little perspective on dreams and definitely afterlife from a performance based perspective. So thank you so much for being here. We've got a mix from London based and Amsterdam based panelists, which is great a mix. And as you might have noticed, the show consists of London based artists as well as Amsterdam based artists. So it's really special to have a show that's so collaborative and showcase these two cities coming together. So I'm going to begin and actually offer a question group, and you will have such different approaches and come from such different perspectives. And so be interesting to hear from each of you how you might interpret this. But I'd be curious to know how, through the different modalities, you feel that it's important to sort of talk about death and the afterlife and all of these kind of strange overwhelms that line between all of the weird ambiguities that we might not know about. So why is that important to your work, and why have you all each committed so much of your careers to exploring the unknown?

DB: That's very good question. I think the reason why it is very important is because I think death that is an inherent part of life. So it's like deterioration and destruction and in this, in this current world, so facing a lot of it, and it's important to have rituals and practices to give things its proper place, to kind of like make a home out of this big scary world but that's what we have  These rituals for. And death like Isabella beautifully described is that death is not just the end of the process, but it's a stage in transformation and becoming something something else. And I think it's all about the journey. Art and fiction helps us to envision that journey and project our fantasies onto that at the same time. What else I really wanted to emphasise is how a material realm is also part of part of death. We are currently sitting around plastic crates and plastic is like the ultimate dead material from refined oil. And oil is made from creatures that have had once lived and then where we're put into the ground and these have always been processed up unto the point where we now have this artificial thing called plastic. So death is part of life in so many different ways.

BC:  So that's an interesting question. I was asked that question by a friend of mine, and she said, 'Why are you so preoccupied with death?' And because I'm a researcher of near death experiences, and I don't know if all of you know what they are.These are experiences that are overwhelming for those who have it. Typically, people leave their body after a medical critical situation or an accident, sometimes after a psychological crisis, or even with a prayer or meditation. Occasionally and also spontaneously. So it can happen to you too. What happens is that people leave their body, they can roam around everybody for a bit, and then leave this realm. They go to this otherworldly environment that is stable love and unconditional love, actually, it's more than that. They see deceased relatives. They see light. They have a life review. Not every NDE (Near Death Experience) is same as otherwise. So that is what NDE is. People come back again because they need to go back, or they want to go back. People want those two and when they are back there, they totally changed. I wanted to research this contact for this phenomenon is very inconsistent, and that's where the answer of the question is--it gives really wonderful hope for people living, because we all have a purpose to be here, every single one of us, also the beggar industry, someone we will step over, perhaps because we think they're not an important person. Everyone's important, and life continues, and giving love to others, that's the most important thing, because when you look at life reviews, you will see that in a life review, you see your own life laid out. You can access any single moment, but not only as yourself, but also as the persons you acted with. So you become the other, and you have to think about that for a second, but that means you can feel what the other felt as if you are the other, and you all realise that we will change our way and more welcoming to each other and towards nature, at least more....

ADW: I could talk about this forever. There are so many ways in which sleep and death, dream and death, are proximate. Many philosophers have noted this. For instance, some have said they are afraid to sleep because sleeping represents an interruption of consciousness, a step toward death. The sleeping realm is often viewed as a threshold that tends to lead toward death, where transmutation occurs: the death of the body and consciousness in one case, and in dreaming, the transmutation of the content of the day—the decay of the day—into strange visual content. There are countless fascinating parallels. For example, the sweet feeling of death and the emotional experience of dreaming, as well as near-death experiences, provide opportunities to examine and re-examine our privileges and biases about the waking, material realm. They suggest that the dream realm is no less a living reality. In dreams, the soul may temporarily divide off, rejoining again later, revealing deeper truths about life. This is why we should not marginalize dreams or death. Instead of raising terrifying statements or dismissing these topics, we should rethink their roles in our lives. Dreams and death often exist on the periphery of our understanding, perhaps because we don’t fully grasp their significance or we fear them. But when we look deeper, we might find that these realms are just as valid forms of existence. That’s why I’m so passionate about exploring these other realms—the dream realm and the death realm—as profoundly different yet interconnected forms of life.

CJ: Those are all really beautiful answers. I'll say for myself, I think that the most important thing about creating art, about liminality, about depth, about magical depth and dreamscapes, for me, is the attraction to what's ephemeral. Because everything is ephemeral. Everything is due to decay, and everything will not last. And so while we're here and while we're sharing a moment together, it's a valuable moment in which life can just be present. And for me as a performance artist, it's always an uncanny feeling to be involved in a state in which you are performing in a place that goes very, very quickly. And so for me, I really resonate with otherness, because otherness is a reminder of what is not immediately conceived or pain. And for me, it is a reflection of life being the process, life being an inherent creation of the moment and nowhere is that best represented but within performance where you are there presently creating with your body, with tools, with objects, creating associations, which like sandcastles, you build and the ocean washes away. And you're there briefly to observe there and to use memory and tell this. And so for me, memory and dreams, and death all relate to our collective aspiration to explore experience. And for me, it is the pivotal thing which reminds us just as species, as being humans, but it is really important to create in a place where things are affectable and to reflect on. And I think that talking about death and talking about dreams is a really beautiful opportunity for all of us to...all of us to exhibit our own lives as our worlds, our inner worlds, places which cannot have a material. And so what we try to do in art is to give the material to the things that are immaterial, this is what I'm going to try to do tonight with a small performance. I'm going to do before all of you. And yeah, I'll talk more about that later.

IG: I feel like something that feels very vibrant and at the heart of everything that you've all said feels to be this almost ephemeral aspect that the concept of the notion of death brings forth. And again, this idea of what remains and what is lost and what is discarded. Obviously, that this is a greater debate, as I mentioned earlier, like when the body dies, we have this classic fact of the body weighing significantly less after it clinically dies. And so the assumption there is that maybe the soul has weight or something departs that we're not able to weigh or fully understand. And again, some of the  works in the show speak to that as well, the way that we might archive death. Talking about recording death, some of you might have seen a small screen that is...basically COVID to play out of these streamed funeral services on YouTube, and it actually tells you how many people are streaming at once. The way that the show ends, of course, is this sort of strange portal door with an AI man, almost like a digital screen, that suggests that maybe death is like a digital escape or afterlife, which received some confusion and criticism from from perhaps older generations that couldn't understand this constant completion of the digital realm and things like death and religion and hope and trust and something might be interested to ask yours is how you think the digital age might influence our concept of mortality and the afterlife and the way in which, I suppose, the digital realms has become such an important part of our own lives and the way that we archive information, the way that we understand ourselves, the way that we understand others. So whether or not we want to actively engage in it is such a huge part of our lives, and so it would no doubt affect major things like mortality and death and concepts of the afterlife, not only in how we record them but also how we think about them and how we can see them both. So I was very interested to hear from each of your different perspectives, how you feel the digital climate might impact our larger conceptions of mortality.

DB: This digital era that we have ushered in is very interesting one. Nothing really dies on the internet. So it's a place where things just accumulate and never really tend to leave. In my practice, I made a lot of work about how images themselves, especially self portraiture, even like when it comes to the profile picture on Facebook or Instagram, it's always there while we, in real life, we transform and change, and also change our appearance. I think that's a very interesting part about about the digital age, that images tend to outlive us and have a life of their own. In many cases, people that go viral online or like their images are much more rich and interesting lives online than their everyday life. That's one part of it. And other than, ever since COVID, we have a different way of dealing with that, through the traditional realm, which I think is beautifully summarised by the piece by Max Otis King, or in the beginning of this exhibition, we have this small, red box that Isabella already explained shows the least watched funeral ceremonies that really only occurred after COVID and after we were not allowed to physically congregate, and instead, we started digitally congregating in many ways, and that's one of many reasons why we're in this contemporary mess. But these kinds of exhibitions are places where we can put those things on display and reflect on them. As Charlie said earlier, you can make everything that is immaterial, and materialise it with art. It's quite special to have these words that kind of address all these material topics in this very physical place. 

BC: Actually, I don't quite know how to answer this questions. The digital world around us gives us opportunities to see stories elsewhere and from my realm, it is important that I can see people having their near death experience, either in Australia or in the US or in South America. And something else, I love being on Zoom because then I can discuss things while being on the board of directors of the International Association for Near Death Experiences or the other board members in America and I live in Europe, I'm the only out of America person, so that makes it easy for me to join, and 20 years before, that couldn't have been done, because you have to see each other in order to have communication without being next to each other. And I did come back, unfortunately.

IG: A quick question, Bob, just to note on that. I'm curious, actually if, I suppose, everything's becoming so digital now, like I feel that last door...it's really now into people's psyches and unconsciousness, somehow I know that people rarely dream about phones or computers. Even though we're on them all, all the time, and often people's dreams incorporate more kind of like raw materials rather than digital materials. But I wonder if, in any of the recorded near death experiences you found, do you feel that any of the sort of like the visual or the phenomena or elements of what people are seeing near death isn't all influenced by the digital climate. Or would you say that it's completely opposite and continues to kind of have more natural elements, and if you would like to speak on any specific things that people have shared with you, that they have seen in their death.

BC: Actually what you're asking now is, what do people see in their near death experience? They see not one end is the same as another. They are all different. And one reason why that is is that these experiences are out of this world. People cannot really understand what it's like they participate in it, when they have their experience, but when they come back again, they don't...There, they know everything. They understand everything. It is logical. It's more real than here. That's another light skinned to say you don't need anything digital there, because everything is more real than here. They even say, what we have here is of a lesser reality than there. So when they come back again, they have to adapt again to this world, which is difficult, and they can see all kinds of stuff and one isn't the same as the other, and they feel that it's very difficult to explain what they are. They are ineffable. To explain for people here, it means that it's a word to indicate that you cannot put a word on something because we don't have the words for it. There's no concepts enough to explain what these experiences are. So it's really very interesting to research these things. That's why their content ranges from one end to the other. Some people see Jesus, some people see Krishna because they know Jesus, so they see something else in the afterlife. So nothing digital there.

DB: Like, in my estimation, I expect to like a lot of memes if I ever die. I think that'll come up somehow. They are also kind of icons for our time and you see the cool things that really stick with you. Or is it just like flash to everyday experiences? 

BC:  That is an interesting thing, that it seems that there are somethings playing out, or things from the collective unconscious of law, but also things from your unconscious, things that you have gone through in mind. But the thing is that there is something in background that's the same everywhere, for everyone, and that's the unconditional love that's to be seen. That's recounted over and over. The feeling of unity, there is a very profound feeling that we all are connected very closely. You don't see that while you're here, but there, you know that they're closely connected with everything, every other human being, but also with all the animals within nature, with everything in the universe. I can only say that.

ADW: Take, for example, an American tribe where, when someone died, their partner would sleep in the same room and dream of their loved one. These dreams were seen as a form of spiritual communication or purification, a way to connect with the deceased and allow their spirit to move on. This underscores the interplay between dreams and death, between the personal and the collective, and between the individual unconscious and a larger, shared astral realm. I recently read a fascinating study where scientists experimented with REM sleep. They found that when two people were in REM sleep and one received a transmitted signal or idea, that same idea could be transferred to the other sleeper. This hints at a potential connection between dreamers, a shared consciousness or communication beyond our waking understanding. It raises questions about the near-death realm. Could this shared dreaming state be similar to near-death experiences? Are these realms close to, just outside of, or fundamentally different from the living experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. On a tangent, going back to Isabella's point about the digital realm, it’s intriguing to think about how we conceive of the selves we project into the digital sphere. Are these digital traces extensions of our life force? Do they represent fragmented personas that persist beyond us? Or do they die a separate kind of death? The digital world has often been described as a haunted landscape, not just because it contains digital remnants of the dead, but because it transforms those remnants into a kind of immortality. I know people whose Instagram and Facebook accounts have become memorial sites, virtual tombstones where their names and images persist. These spaces—what some call digital cemeteries—blur the lines between the living and the dead, creating an internet full of ghosts, both metaphorical and literal. In this sense, the internet becomes a kind of liminal space, a place that’s neither fully alive nor fully dead. It’s simultaneously a heaven, a scapegoat, and an escape. This haunting digital presence raises profound questions about how we understand life and death in the age of technology.

CJ: Well, I think coming back to again, just previously mentioning the digital selves, also in relation to the artwork of the AI person. It's interesting because I think digital is really another platform for just communicating, with talking before the internet. But what I find really interesting is I grew up with the computer. I would almost consider my computer like my first parents, in a sense, because looking at screens, looking at images, has built my way of viewing people, viewing communication, and as someone who is autistic as well, the way in which I sort of associate myself with other people And also remember things is also through images, through texts, or through and so for me, like to be able to identify through a digital form is an expression, which I also resonate a lot with dreams. And I would say also to Isabella's question to Bob about digital landscapes in death, my dreamscapes, I feel, are heavily affected by also viewing screens. Often, I will dream about watching a film, and the film in the dream will be another memory of a place that I visited, and I won't know it. I won't realise it until the film becomes another window of life.We were talking earlier about how at the end of things, when there was just a code or an artifice, it is really the resonance that we place on this name, on this person, regardless if they're fake or not, that they are someone worth caring for, regardless if they exist or not. It's the residence that binds us to death and finds us to memory and so that, I think speaks so much about digital but also I just want to add a note, you were saying about the internet being almost like an archive of the dead, memorials, that association I find very interesting as well, because you can document your life publicly online, and so you can view parts of your childhood through all these things that you have, or, you know, you can go on the way back machine. You can kind of see all the websites that are corrupted. And also, the thing that I find really interesting is that you mentioned the internet being something that could live forever, but actually data, you know, data corrupts in it. You know, it takes physical power to power the generators that function AI imagery. And that really surprised me, the physical component that creates a digital image. And so in that regard, the physical process that makes any digital image present is, you know, it is of the same function as it would be to be someone or to physically create something and that I find very fascinating, just in regards to how digital streams death. Someone creates an image. But I guess something I will end this speech on really shortly, because this is such a great question, and it's honestly like a whole, whole panel in itself could come out of this question. But recently, a friend of mine who passed away, my friend Dextro, I have seen images of them so frequently on my feed and in my head, I don't really feel that they have passed like I feel that they are still with me, because I keep seeing images of them. I keep seeing images of them on people's stories, textures of the videos that look as if they were taken yesterday. And so my mind immediately processes as a present event. And, you know, the anemone of that, you know, it starts in a very rich way about how we connect to each other through memories, and also how someone dies it is then our responsibility, and how we take care of that memory, and how we take care of that presence, and also just everything we see here is going to be documented on photos that we're going to look back at, and it's going to be our access to being able to remember it. So I think that also, speaks so much about remembrance above all things.

IG: Thank you so much. That was so beautiful, and I agree, is such an important thing to consider, and even like the ethics as well, that the ethical implications to potentially, you know, circulating images of the dead, obviously, in the instance of your friend, that's not for profit. But obviously, you know, there are so many instances of people sort of generating holograms and holographs of celebrities that have passed away, which is exploitative. So there's instances where, you know, it can potentially disrupt the morning process or confuse the morning process, perhaps. And then there's other instances where it might actually, in fact, exploit and profit and monetise up with the morning process. I remember seeing like a hologram of like Robert Kardashian, that really academic and niche reference here guys,  that Kanye West had gifted Kim Kardashian to have that day. And it was so surreal, because he was kind of like this white hologram being like, hi, Kimberly, I miss you, and I'm so proud of you. Obviously, Robert Kardashian didn't say that because he's dead. That sounded far more brutal than I meant for it too. But the truth is that he is dead. So it does raise some of several like, you know, ethical implications of like, can we speak for the dead? If so, how do they sing and what do they talk? And so perhaps it doesn't matter, because they've died and they can no longer consent to this. And ultimately, we can all argue, we can all agree that those videos were potentially helpful for Kim Kardashian, because it sort of helped her process, you know, the death of her own father, in fact, that he wasn't able to be there on her birthday. And so it does raise several interesting questions about how death in the digital process and mourning all intersect. Something else I was thinking about too, and especially a big part of wanting to curate for the show was about the way that we are so kind of mortified about death, and this very like corporeal aspect of decay, of the rotting body and the smell and the sense of death, and the complete fear of even bringing it out or talking about it. And you know, when someone dies, it's like no one knows what to say, and we don't talk about that enough, you know, it's just like, I'm so sorry, that's not enough. And then would feel free to ask what might be enough? And the politics surrounding death is so deeply complex, and one piece that has deeply inspired my own research and practice, and wanting to curate a show on death and talk more about it within the space and beyond that, is definitely Teresa Margolles work. She did this one show where she basically fills the room, released all of these bubbles, and all of these children were running around and trying to pop the bubbles. And the bubbles were actually made from water that was used to wash their bodies in the morgue. And all of these children are like running around, like popping bubbles, because no one's really like, looking to see the description of the work, and obviously the parents look to read it and are horrified like, 'My God, my children's have been popping these dead people's bodies and bubbles'. All very grotesque and jarring. But again, it speaks to our avoidance of death, and also our complete disgust at finding out that something that is so natural and playful, like bubbles and potentially death, because really it is just a natural process, is also so deeply politically and culturally charged outside of its more poetic ambiguity. So I'm curious as to your thoughts about, why do we have this, deep disgust and grotesque association to death and dying and decay, and is it our own weird projections of losing control of our own bodies and of our own lives, of our own routines, and the people we've learned from. Is it something else? Perhaps a difficult question to answer, but we are on a death panel of all things. So, if not here then where?

DB: I think  one of the main reasons why we are discussing with death, I think, because in the face of death or destruction or deterioration, we would assert our own vitality. Julie Kristeva, psychoanalyst and philosopher talked a great deal about that in her nominal essay, 'The Power of Horror', where, if you see corpse and well, you know, the corpse recently died, but there's still signs of vitality, and it's an entity that is somewhere in between an object and subject, and that sort of confusion elicits, is discussed. And through this discussion, we actually discovered it very vital and alive ourselves. And I think what's very interesting about working a lot with death and gore and visual arts is that once you get past this, well, I guess this somewhat expected response of disgust, you start noticing very formal things. You start noticing the aesthetics of death and how the decaying body can also be incredibly beautiful and sublime. So I would say, to discuss this very natural response. But it's also very interesting to examine what happens after that immediate response and see what lures you in, what fascinates you or repulses you.

BC: Okay, so disgust with death. Let me say to you that NDEers lose that because they know for sure that life continues. They lose their grace and their fear of death. That's interesting. That's amongst the most significant aspects of Near Death Experiences. That's from research. That's one of the things that is predominant it shows that people lose their fear of death. Actually, they have a home sickness to go back again in a wonderful place, yet they know that they shouldn't do it themselves, because there's a reason for their life. So the disgust with death is made from people who haven't had that experience. If you really look into NDE, if you see more of them, you will change as well. NDEs are life changers. Those were added. But if you study them, if you read a number of them, and also, especially when you find out that they are real, then you can change as well. You can also change your fear of death, and in order to see that they are real, you need to see some of the research that's done to see if these stories, because they feel like very fairytale stories, are real, and there are critical observations of verifiable out of my experiences in which people, when they at the first phase of their NDE, they get out of their body, they can roam around where they were in the hospital, or near the crash side of their car or whatever. And then they see things, and then they have their near death experience. And when they have to come back again, they can say, well, I've seen this map, and that has been independently confirmed later on. There are hundreds of these stories, and I'll give you just one example, which was very well researched. A woman was brought into the hospital. She had her...there that was a great situation. She left her body went out of the window or off the roof. There's no limitations, and you can go through concrete, through closed windows. She saw on the ledge of the hospital a shoe. After she had her NDE, she came back into her body, and she was resuscitated. And then she said, she asked one of the nurses, 'Can you really find out if there's a blue shoe on the ledge somewhere? Because I want to know if this, what I went through, was real.' And then the nurse, whom I know, went out looking for the shoe on the ledges. She had to lean over, out of the windows. And finally, she found the shoe. She recovered it. And so this person was somewhere else other than where the body was. And there are hundreds of these stories, and there are also stories, I have one experience of those where someone said things that would happen in the future. So this person had a view to the future during the end. So that's not here somewhere. But then this other world environment that later on proved to be true. So fear of death for those who have had an NDE, they lose it altogether.

ADW: Of course, when we think about mortal bodies, it raises the question: how do we move on from the fear of death, dying, and decay? How do we redeem ourselves from that fear? One way to approach this is through the concept of vigil—keeping vigil as a way of staying present, of bearing witness. I would argue that keeping a dynamic relationship with dreams is a kind of vigil. In dreaming, the unconscious keeps vigil over the day, casting a protective veil over the vulnerable, sleeping body. At the same time, it processes the traumas and emotions of the waking world. In this sense, a dream diary becomes an act of witnessing, a way of bringing knowledge from those ephemeral, morbid realms into the light of day. It’s a kind of vigil that connects us with what is happening beyond our conscious awareness. We also have more conventional forms of vigil, like the Jewish shiva, where people sit with the dead in proximity, refusing to look away from the body. This act of staying close to the deceased, of looking at the dead body, or of being with the dying or the sick, requires a wakefulness and presence that is profoundly uncomfortable. It’s terrifying because it reminds us of our own mortality. We don’t want to think about it—we want to believe we’re immortal, to look away, to sleep. But keeping vigil is about resisting that urge, about staying present with the uncomfortable and the inevitable. I believe that one way to retain a meaningful relationship with death is through this active practice of vigil—bringing the concept of vigil into our daily lives, consciously. It’s a way of bearing witness to life and death, of facing the terrifying truths rather than turning away.

CJ: These are some really beautiful, beautiful answers. I don't think I have so much to add to what's already been discussed, but I just wanted to say I think that, just as someone who creates castes, bodies and works with essentially, what are memories of people's impressions, my own personal relation to how bodies change and alter at the time and decay is interesting in terms of how a body can you know, it seems something that you know is inherently dead or even something that is inherently fake, there's this this sense of passage that you bring to something, and I think for a lot of people, it's very uncomfortable, because it's that confrontation that You bring to acknowledging the fact that things are ephemeral, and I think that it's a natural response, but it's also a very important question. I mean, just how many of us think about how we're going to die in terms of like, how are we going to prepare for our funeral? Do we want to have a funeral? Do we want to be cremated questions like these are important, just for the expense of funerals and whatnot, but also, I think that the issue of death is that it is ultimately about kind of recognising that we are, in a sense, just, you know, like you live for such a short time, and that we're limited, but I think that within the exposure and the confrontation of these sort of subjects, one this kind of thing, and you know, Anna mentioned vigils, I think vigils are a really beautiful way of making it sort of like our responsibility to then celebrate and make a memory of who has passed. And that's all have to say about that.

IG: Thank you so much. I suppose beyond that, hopefully questions will be answered in the show, but also will never fully be answered, because none of us are dead, yet. So, that's something to look forward to, but purely in an explorative way we will find out one day. Thank you all so much. I'm gonna close the panel with a poem like Leona rove. And then we'll have a few moments for some some questions. And then we will pause. This poem called The long alley. And I suppose it explains itself, perhaps:A river glides out of the grass. A river or a serpent. A fish floats belly upward, Sliding through the white current, Slowly turning, Slowly. The dark flows on itself. A dead mouth sings under an old tree. The ear hears only in low places. Remember an old sound.Remember Water. This slag runs slow. What bleeds when metal breaks? Flesh, you offend this metal. How long need the bones mourn? Aer those horns on top of the hill? Yesterday has a long look. Loo, loo, said the sulphurous water, There's no filth on a plateau of cinders. This smoke's from the glory of God. Can you name it? I can't name it. Let's not hurry. The dead don't hurry. Who else breathes here? What does the grave say? My gates are all caves.So yes, thank you all. And that concludes our panel. We have a few moments for any questions.

Question 1: I had a question for Bob, actually. I was very curious if you've done research into DMT, because I have, from my limited knowledge and limited understanding of near death experiences, is like your brain secretes DMT. So it very, very interesting, if you know people who took DMT and then had a near death experience, or had a near death experience influenced by DMT or Ayahuasca what kind of relationships?

BC: That's a good question, and I do not really have an answer to that, because near death experiences are very special. Also, when you use ayahuasca, sometimes you go through a good episode, sometimes through a bad episode, but I'm not sure whether it is researched very well, if they are similar or the same. I'm not sure whether in ayahuasca, you can get real good messages from deceased relatives or from the other side that later proved to be correct. But I'm not knowledgeable about that. I know that there is research that people try to stimulate parts of the brain, and then people seem to go through or where they seem to be outside the body when they make another part of the brain. But I'd say, then you don't have the complete experience because we have partial experiences. Moreover, you don't have critical observations with these kind of experiments. Maybe yet, but you don't have them, and those make NDE special, especially when there is a critical observations where people have seen something that is later confirmed, like what the doctors did during operation, or what the nurses said during the operation, or when they had a message from the other side that was meaningful for people here in our world, that makes NDEs special, I think. But again, I should say I don't know to your question. Sorry.

IG: Does anyone else have any questions?

Question 2: Yeah. Thank you very much for that insightful talk. I was really interested, Charles, in you had been saying about this disconnect between us often thinking of the digital realm as something that's ephemeral and completely immortal, but in fact, it's sort of made up of physical components that are just as prone to decay as us and our bodies and everything else found us. And yeah, I was kind of wondering if anybody else on the panel would felt about this kind of disconnect between the digital being seen as this ephemeral thing, but is, in fact, decaying, and I suppose, how we might start to reconsider our digital afterlives as the reality of the internet as a visible thing...

IG: I'm happy to speak on that. I actually, I recently wrote a piece for Polyesterzine about ethical implications of the digital landscape, interacting with with things like death and the way in which it's become almost really complex and hard to go on and process things, because things are perpetually digitally resurrected. So it doesn't even have to be just simply in the way of, like, people passing away and us constantly, you know, seeing resurfaced images of them, which is also potentially quite disruptive to the mourning process and very real. There's also, I guess, in a perhaps more lighthearted way, the resurrection of, you know, even like ex partners. Your iPhone will be like 'three years ago', and it's like the worst image ever, I didn't want to remember that. Or it's like, 'oh, this time four years ago, dining'. And then it's like your mental breakdown that you never wanted to see again, like a picture of crying. So your phone is almost like constantly regurgitating aspects of the past. And it's deeply confusing and unnerving. And I think even when you have like, all of these images of what your life used to look like, or even like your face or other people's faces, it's super unnerving, this wasn't meant to happen, and again, memories, and the way that the internet  archives things is so bizarre. Like, on Facebook, it will be like, 'this happened on so and so,' and it becomes increasingly complex and strange. And there's also, like, that was that celebrity, I can't remember who it was, but she had, like, faked her in death online. And the way that we can kind of like play within the politics of death and mourning and even resurrection through digital interfaces is so strange and perverse and like deeply complex and at times, quite unethical. And what's really bizarre is that all of these technological advances, and all these social media sites and algorithms, are essentially profiting off of the dead in many ways, and they're harvesting all this data on people that have died, and exploiting it. So I don't know if that answers your question or further complicates it, but I do think it's something that really needs to be considered, because at the end of the day, like whether we want to interact with the digital realm or not, it is something that exists, and so naturally, it's gonna seep into our own collective psyches and seep into all of the things that render us deeply human, death being one of them. So whether we want to admit it or not, the digital world will become deeply emerged and intwined with dying and even resurrection, whether it's through a weird shared album three years ago that iPhone or Apple likes to remind you of on a random Wednesday afternoon at 3pm or, you know, in a in a more complex and difficult way, where it's constantly reminding you of people that have passed away when you're trying to mourn, it continues to be a real issue and something we need to really think about and interrogate.

BC:  Can I just add one more thought on the DMT question. When people have such an experience. I'm not sure whether their experience is coherent in a way that there is a story playing out. When you're in an NDE there is a story that makes it different from hallucinations, because hallucinations are chaotic, there's not really a storyline there, while with NDE, there is meaningful information that comes through and that people bring back home. Moreover, in NDE, people remember the details of NDE years after. They tell the same story over and over again. It doesn't change. Nothing is added or subtracted from it whereas with dreams or drugs. Dreams can evaporate quite quickly, and hallucinations are in that way chaotic, they evaporate as well. You want to add something?

CJ: I suppose, again, going back to a comment that you made earlier, what this ultimately speaks about, I think, is the physical process of restoring, resurrecting, is again, a larger issue about how we can systematically and culturally use memory to preserve people and places, and how what it's mainly  you think about is just how memory is really it is a really important thing that Just surrounds all of us, regardless of whether it is digital. Digital is a very physical thing, and so therefore it is an action. All memory is an action, and so therefore it is important in how we preserve people.

IG: Thank you so much about any final questions before we wrap up the Death Panel. Well, thank you so much. And you know, I suppose, just like that, this doesn't end. It is continuous, contemplation on death and the artillery that's perpetual and really, we'll never know until we die but this is a very enjoyable show, hopefully, to consider the themes regardless and there'll be drinks and we'll have a little pause after all this really long and hard thinking about decay and rot and dying, and then we will be reunited with some wonderful performances. So please stay around for that. And if any anyone has any other questions, feel free to come find me or anyone else. But thank you again to my brilliant panelists from all over the world.