Stacey Pitsillides and Ellen Sampson: Postmortem Life

Postmortem Life envisions an alternative immortality that unfurls through our biological and data bodies, diverging and converging into post-digital worlds. As technology and genealogy companies market DNA and personal data as routes to eternal life, often for those who can afford it, the artists ask what is lost when a body, and the trillions of microorganisms it hosts, is reduced to data. Pitsillides and Sampson’s film Caught Between Slides of Screen, made from archive footage and AI-generated imagery, is projected onto the wall above a landscape of fabric and wax. At its centre a sinkhole flows upwards into a cushioned plinth, where a soft, breathing “techno-flesh” form stirs as you approach, asking to be held. Visitors are invited to feel, hold, lounge, breathe and watch, becoming part of a feminist immortality as it slips free of our control.