“Be seated, supernal guests, be seated. Be seated, guests of faith, be seated.” (Sefer Ha-zohar)

Somewhere in the vast mausoleum of the internet, amongst the ancient cyber pyramids, the living-dead dance. They move and sing in concert, humming and chuntering fractions of their memories, of who and what they used to be. They are the ancients who had walked this earth, imprinting their existence upon the mnemonic substance of the internet hive mind. Like bits of wisdom that were left deep inside the veins of online data, the elders move within the incessant flow of information. In solitude, they patiently wait to utter their voice to whoever is willing to listen, 

In a world in which internet users leave behind enormous quantities of digital data residues, where can we find the entombed remnants of our fathers and mothers? Who will speak to us across the boundaries of time and space? Who will offer us advice in times of crisis, when life is fragile and unbearable?  

According to the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, by 2070, dead Facebook users would outnumber the living. With time, our personal pages will become memorial headstones, and our human presence will transform into a zombie-like being, meant to endlessly roam the vast expanses of the online world. This is also the starting point of Natalie Feldesman’s research on the gap between our physical body and the body of data we leave behind.    

Feldesman chooses to look at digital memories and instances: YouTube clips, texts and recordings made by humans whose physical bodies passed away from this life, leaving behind orphaned internet beings, detached from the bodies that created them.  

Using a synthesizer software converting video input to sound in real time, which was developed especially for this show, Feldesman summons ghosts from the internet archive. She conjures them up from the online abyss, creating a fictional dialog between them. In this continuous podcast, voices of spirits from the past are orchestrated into an audio-visual radio play that traverses different times and cultures, revoicing these characters and offering them a renewed existence. 

The exhibition is an invitation into a guest room, a room of Ushpizin (Aramaic for “guests”) situated between the living and the dead—an invitation extended to the spiritual fathers and mothers of our culture to join the dinner table, an afterparty between two worlds. It is an eternal moment, in which the dead share a slow, infinite dance with the living.