etoy.CORPORATION
Mission eternity sarcophagus
Switzerland, 2006-07
Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation). The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.
etoy is art and invests all resources in the production of art. The firm represents the core and code of a corporate sculpture, and controls, protects, promotes, and exploits its cultural substance. The private held company is owned by more than 2000 etoy.SHAREHOLDERS: art collectors, venture capitalists, the etoy.AGENTS, and a few hundred TOYWAR.soldiers. etoy received several international art awards (i.e. the Golden Nica / Prix Ars Electronica), was invited at many international festivals and regularly appears in the media (New York Times, CNN, El Pais, Le Monde, NZZ, La Rebubblica, Relax Japan, etc.). etoy.CREW-MEMBERS spoke at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, UCSD in San Diego, DASARTS in Amsterdam, ETH Zurich, and intercommunication center icc in Tokyo.
Since 1998, orange etoy.TANKS (standardized windowless shipping containers) build etoy's mobile and multifunctional office system. Wherever etoy is needed in the physical world, the orange etoy.TANKS pop up; between 1998 and 2006, i.e. in NEW YORK, ZURICH, TOKYO, BERLIN, MADRID, SAN JOSE. For the current project MISSION ETERNITY between 10 and 25 etoy.AGENTS build etoy's international crew.