Because life is online, so is death. Files, photos, profiles—digital remains—left behind by the deceased are newfound artifacts for mourning and memorial. Social media platforms and the infrastructures that house them have become cemeteries and funeral homes: hosts to both formal gatherings and casual remembrance. The symbolism of the ‘cloud’ is almost magical in its otherworldly allusions. This affirms the perceptual mysticism of novel technology, or what Mayte Gómez Molina—author of MMMAD’s 2025 curatorial framework—describes as the “moment in which consciousness reaches its horizon and cannot see beyond it.”
Clients and Servers examines funerals, contemporary and historical, that rehearse the networked distribution of bereavement enabled by the online today. It identifies a proto-virtual exemplar in the 1665 funerary apparato of Philip IV—the monarch of Spain whose demise coincided with the empire’s initial decline. His funeral was global in its reach and set in motion the construction of elaborate catafalques in the urban centers of the empire, including Madrid, Milan, Naples, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Mexico City, and Lima.
Philip IV’s Naples catafalque was both a model of the world and one in a network of communication devices dispatched across the planet. Baroque funeral apparati, from the Italian “apparecchio” for “instrument” or “set,” included architectural translations of the funeral pyre of antiquity. Often covered in candles, catafalques were tiered structures with biographic and mythic iconographic programs grounded in terrestrial symbols that gave way to the divine and cosmic in their upper registers.
Clients and Servers presents a 1:2 scale facsimile of Philip IV’s Naples catafalque (designed in 1665 by royal engineer Francesco Antionio Picchiatti), accompanied by a poem written by the London-based writer, publisher, and curator, Sarah Shin. The poem identifies twelve historical flashpoints that conceptually link contemporary cultures of online death and mourning to the logistical funeral apparatus of Philip IV. What technologies have since emerged that rehearse and expand the logics of King’s 17th century infrastructure to atomize memorial across material and virtual eco-systems? Shin responds to that question in a trans-historical constellatory narrative. Conscious of Philip IV’s interest in the astrological and the cosmic—and in reference to the catafalque’s iconographic program—each of the twelve episodes is given an astrological reading, with one house represented from its chart. It occasionally quotes Life is a Dream, a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who wrote under the patronage of Philip IV.
Sarah Shin reminds us that mundane astrology yields the largest recorded dataset in human history. The ritual imaginary that materialized the funeral catafalques of Philip IV understood humanity’s penchant to record and locate as a formal enterprise and called on architecture to organize that effort.
Hung about with screens animating a scenario from each episode and scrappily held together with packing tape, the cardboard catafalque alludes to the logistical ethic and ephemeral spirit of Philip IV’s multi-national memorial program.
Project credits
This work was commissioned by Cristóbal Baños and Diego Iglesias for MMMAD Festival Urbano de Arte Digital de Madrid 2025 and exhibited at HYPER HOUSE.
Project by Common Accounts
Astropoetry by Sarah Shin with fragments from “Life is a Dream” by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, translated by Roy Campbell
Project Manager and Fabrication Coordinator: Andrea Muniáin
Designer and Research Assistant: Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland
Animations and Video Editing: Emilie Tamtik
Assembly Team: Adina L. Velázquez, María Escudero
Recycled Cardboard Provider: Papeles Cruz S.A.
Commissioned by MMMAD
MMMAD Directorship: Cristóbal Baños and Diego Iglesias
MMMAD Curatorial Framework: Mayte Gómez Molina
