Post-mordial : esoteric embodiment

This thesis speculates that common funerary practices do not reflect a wide enough range of contemporary cultural attitudes towards religion, spirituality, and mortality. As human beings increasingly embrace the paradigms of bioinformatics and digital fabrication, this thesis proposes that alternative funerary practices will arise to reflect these cultural attitudes, with individuals taking on increasing levels of both personal and collaborative agency in the design of their own memorial artifacts, and those of their loved ones. Through a series of speculative models, this thesis projects a scenario in which a group of humans embrace their corporeal materiality and its internalized information as precious and sacred, to produce memorial artifacts that are constructed from their own biomatter, and that formally encode streams of genetic information. The artifacts become esoteric 'post-mordial' emodiments of human being, existing as totems of their lineage, and 'momento mori' for remaining humans.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Menos, Kristopher G. (Kristopher Gerard)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William O'Brien Jr.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111468

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111468