Our Digital Afterlives at ESRC Festival of Social Science

Granny Jackson’s Dead is an immersive performance and research project about technology, memory and mourning, which asks what’s good and what’s not-so-good about the ways that technology is changing our ritual lives. This project has involved collaboration with researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University who are working with Big Telly Theatre Company to understand more about what people think about the issues that Granny Jackson’s Dead raises e.g. how can grief technology (‘grief tech’) help us to remember someone after they die? What are the real-world implications of this technology? And finally how can immersive theatre help us to ask these questions?.

Responding to the festival theme ‘Our Digital Lives’, this event will allow us to showcase our research so far into ‘Our Digital Afterlives’. We will show video and photos from the immersive performance, as well as an excerpt from the show and a Q&A with the creative team. You will also be invited to experience some of the new technology used in the show and contribute to our ongoing survey about ‘grief tech’. The project is supported by the Centre for Cultural Value as part of its Collaborate Scheme and will tour the UK in 2024/25.

This project involves Big Telly Theatre Company in Northern Ireland working in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Art and Performance and the School of Digital Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. This event is led by the Performance Research Group based at Manchester School of Art. The Performance Research Group nourishes world-leading, industry-focused and interdisciplinary work in the field of performance. They build practices, structures and projects that bring performance artists and researchers into productive dialogue with each other.

Host or Publisher MIGS: Migration & Interdisciplinary Global Studies