MyDeathSpace
and the Revival/Immortalization
of Early Cinematic Architecture
March 6th, 2008
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Annual Conference 2008
Guimarin March 2008 SCMS Lecture Transcript (PDF Format) 48K Adobe Acrobat File
ABSTRACT: The popular social networking website MySpace contains over 100 million profiles, some of which belong to deceased users. When a MySpace user dies, friends and family members can submit requests to MySpace to access their profiles to maintain them as memorials. MyDeathSpace is a website which chronicles deceased MySpace users in conjunction with newspaper obituaries and stories submitted by friends and family; posts include links to users' MySpace profiles. MySpace and MyDeathSpace serve as memorial structures which exhibit forms, techniques and subjects of early cinema in ways which mutually revive and immortalize those departed cinematic characteristics as well as the deceased individuals represented on the websites. Just as physical architectures possess inherent tendencies to memorialize people, places and events, so do the architectures of film – particularly early film. Dated styles of physical architecture undergo revival through the use of new materials and incorporation of new stylistic elements. Likewise, dated styles of cinematic architecture undergo revival through the use of new media. The constant revival of old architectural styles through new mediums serves to immortalize those styles while concurrently reviving and immortalizing the people, places and events memorialized by the structures of that architecture, both physical and cinematic. This paper draws on interdisciplinary study to contextualize and theorize the practice of online social networking memorials in relation to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference theme, "Architectures of the Moving Image."
LECTURE URLs:
http://www.myspace.com/ameliaguimarin (my profile)
gymnastics, 'I've been changing' - mashed up
shamrocks, 'crazy bitch' - mashed up
My Death Space Latest Articles
Amanda Sparaco's My Death Space Article
Katherine MacDougall's MyDeathSpace Article
Katherine MacDougall's MyDeathSpace Forum Thread
Sid Skibinski-Gonzales' MyDeathSpace Article
Sid Skibinski-Gonzales's MyDeathSpace Forum Thread
Sid Skibinski-Gonzales' MySpace
Tiffany Nealon's MyDeathSpace Article
dolphin, glitter - "unhealthy nervousness"
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