Mission Eternity Sarcophagus, latest etoy project
Kevin Andrew Murphy August 14th, 2006
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Well, I managed to catch this just before it left San Jose. What is it, you may ask? Well, it’s the latest project from etoy, the Zurich-based artists who’ve done various avante-garde tech-savvy art projects over the years, including the ToyWar some years back, where I signed on as one of their “toy soldiers” to help drive the internet toy company “Etoys” (no relation) bankrupt for having sued them because it wanted their domain name.
Anyway, their latest project came to my home town and I managed to catch it before they packed up and left.
Here is the press release:
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The glisteningly white MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS shines in front of the Museum of Art in San Jose, CA. In close vicinity to mortal art, card board architecture, Californian palm trees and dedicated security guards, the SARCOPHAGUS performs its dateless duty of demonstrating deadlines that are here to be crossed by art.
Visitors are ushered through a sound gate into the SARCOPHAGUS after checking in to receive angel status. For security reasons, spiritual and physical, the individual visiting time is limited to 5 minutes inside the SARCOPHAGUS. Instable and spiritually impaired visitors are discouraged from entering the SARCOPHAGUS. Additional information material is available outside and etoy.AGENTS in white may be approached for information and initiation.
The MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS is a mobile sepulcher for users who prefer to be buried at an indetermined geographical location. The mobile cemetery tank is a 20 foot ISO standard cargo container (6m long, 2.4m wide, 2.6m high, 4 tons weight) and potentially travels planet earth forever. The system allows for simple re-location of the mortal remains of up to 1000 M∞ PILOTS.
The SARCOPHAGUS is equipped with an immersive LED screen of 17’000 pixels that cover the walls, ceiling and floor on which the visitors can walk. It displays the ARCANUM CAPSULE content and functions as a public installation wherever the TANK travels.
STORAGE ANGELS, CODERS, LAWYERS AND MORTAL REMAINS COURIERS CAN APPLY ONLINE FOR ANGEL STATUS AND PARTICIPATE IN THE MISSION.  http://www.missioneternity.org/angels Visit http://www.missioneternity.org/ for detailed project documentation, software download, and initiation protocols.
Anyway, an explanation of what I saw. Outside the museum was a white shipping container, and outside of that was some comfy inflatable orange tubing for folk to sit on waiting for the next tour, and there were also various white and orange-clad etoy agents. The etoy agents dress rather like the Oompa-Loompas did in the Wonkavision room in the first version of the movie–clinical spare white tyvek windbreakers with an orange logo, a reversal of the usual orange etoy jumpsuits with white logos.
Anyway, we were ushered into the sarcophagous which was in fact a shipping container with plastic pixils on all walls. You couldn’t see the images that clearly by standing inside of them, but they were of a famous actor from Switzerland who’s signed on to be one of their first “test pilots.” What this means is that when he dies, his cremated remains will be mixed with concrete and used to replace one of the pixils inside the sarcophagous, turning it dark. When visitors enter, they may touch his dark pixil to begin playing the images of him on all the rest, and also on the small viewing screen at the entrance which has a slideshow. More complicated than that, however, is the plan to have his life works and biography stored in electronic form on the internet with redundant servers, hosted back and forth across the world between various users who volunteer their storage media to take a portion. There’s all sorts of crunchy techy goodness to keep the data from being lost, with multiple redundancy across the world.
The plan is for 1000 peouple to be “entoured” in each sarcophagous, leaving those pixils dark and the rest light as the container tours the world and people get to visit and find out more about the people “entoured” there. New sarcophagi will be created in later years, but with the current technology and art aesthetics. It’s definitely interesting to see something I’d first seen in Max Headroom back inthe 80’s now becoming a portion of real life. The docent said the pixils would be replaced everywhere with the cremated remains except the floor (which also had pixils) “out of respect for the dead.” As I mentioned (people were encouraged to ask questions and make comments), burying people in the floors was pretty standard with most of the old cathedrals.
After emerging from the sarcophagous (which got very stuffy inside with everyone standing in it breathing all the air), I went out and chatted with the etoy crew, in paricular Agent Zai who I remembered back from the ToyWar days. He gave me a handful of “zingles” (large chrome ball bearings engraved with the etoy logo) as a reward for my service in the ToyWar, with each a tiny fraction of a voting right in the etoy corporation. If you had a dump truck full, you’d be able to take over.
The next place the Mission Eternity Sarcaphagus is scheduled to be exhibited is at Burning Man, but in the meantime, he and his girlfriend are vacationing and seeing California for a while. I found out that they’ll be in LA at the same time as WorldCon, so Zai may show up for a day and see if any of the SF writers want to sign up to be “entoured” after their deaths.
etoy was in town for the ISEA festival, aka The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. Unfortunately I hadn’t realized they wouldn’t be the only exhibit, and by the time I got there, most of the other artists were striking their tents, or at least their obelisks. I did, however, have a bit of time to be the last visitor to see this black obelisk pimpled with dark LEDs, which was entirely unimpressive until the exhibitor showed me that if you looked at it with a camera phone or other digital video, you’d see words and images scrolling down over the surface in infrared. Terribly cool tech, and an interesting project–the title was “The Fruit of Your Labor” and the data was from folk from Silicon Valley they interviewed.