Raquel Luaces is a PhD student in the Department of Image and Design, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. From September-December 2025 she is a guest researcher at INC. Her supervisor is Montse Morcate, whose work focuses on photographic representations of illness, grief and death (not unlike the work of Tamara Kneese). Raquel Luaces’ research draws from that foundation but expands toward the analysis of emerging image cultures online, particularly those related to grief, mental health, and digital death. She also explores artistic responses to these themes through net art, post-photography, and recent online communities. Raquel Luaces uses images categorised as “liminal spaces” as a case study (in line with Valentina Tanni’s Exit Reality) to examine the formation of online communities, the creation of categories and naming conventions, and the emergence of specific groups centred around images. The email interview below, conducted in July 2025, will be included in her PhD thesis.

Raquel Luaces: In your experience supervising work in the fields of digital death and grief, have you noticed any recurring themes or unresolved questions that seem to persist across different projects? Are there particular gaps or areas you feel remain underexplored? What kinds of questions do you find most compelling or urgent to address now?

Geert Lovink: This is no doubt the social media question. How can you avoid the dominant platform in such a hard, personal moment where you desperately want to talk to others and your friends and share experiences, stories, and grief, but do not want to share all that out in the open? Most of us know about surveillance, extractivism, and the sneaky ways to copy-paste content not meant to be shared with others. The issue is no longer awareness but what to do next. Could a temp WhatsApp group be a solution? We all search… but repeatedly it is proven that these obvious instances are not working. Email then? Setting up something on Zoom or FaceTime? What if people do record it, despite the wish of loved ones not to?

All this leads to a cult of suspicion and distrust. In a time of oversharing, how can you share ultimately private thoughts with intimate others in a moment you feel you HAVE to? You have all these heavy emotions, but know they can no longer be expressed on a phone. I am deliberately not saying through a phone… The phone and the laptop themselves have become the issue. They are guilty objects (this is a reference to the Dutch artist Amando, who influenced me a lot: https://valkhofmuseum.nl/en/verdieping/collectie/moderne-kunst/schuldige-landschaft). These technologies are no longer innocent witnesses. And yet, despite all this, one still has to talk to someone. That’s the dilemma. A prime example of what happens when literally billions of us are stuck on the platform, in despair, not knowing where else to go.

RL: Do you think a specific aesthetic, group of images or community is emerging in relation to grief online? What differentiates digital grief from earlier cultural forms in the last 3-5 years? (Besides tribute pages or online memorials, which feel far from Gen Z…)

GL: There is no longer freedom of expression online. Let’s see what this implies in this context. People become shy about posting anything and even hesitate to respond with simple likes. What is a ‘like’ anyway in the context of grief? Formal web design is disgusting in these situations. Memorial pages on social media are omnipresent but feel empty, even when semi-closed. One never knows who copies the content anyway. Are the memorial videos put up as formalities? For the family? Business relations? School? Real friends or intimates wouldn’t do this. What really matters circulates peer-to-peer. Music is even more important and is here to stay. A song hits deeper emotional levels and is often experienced as a vital element to memorise a person. Pictures are too, but they can so easily become a cliché (where do you safely keep them?). What’s astonishing is the software ease with which a lifeline, a chronology of a person’s life, is put together—and then shared. But this is precisely not something for later. It is a moving social document for the ceremonial part.

RL: I’ve been researching how aesthetics like traumacore or nostalgia-driven visual cultures relate to mental health and digital grief. What other critical entry points should be explored to understand the intersection of image, grief, death, and online aesthetics?

GL: For those not into it, read this intro on fandom about traumacore. We need to dive into the seemingly random, xtreme contextual subcultures and personalised experiences of the online billions that surround us. While there is something like a dominant Western global online culture, there is simultaneously a proliferation of ultra-local, regional, language-based, identity-driven expressions that are as real as the Official Reality we all live in. Cultural workers on the digital frontiers are up to us to describe these specific forms of traumacore. These articulations are nowhere near the art scene. Even theory hardly touches them (except Valeria Tanni). The Italian-Palestinian artist, connected to INC, Noura Tafeche, has used these subcultures in her work, but in contrast with IDF and the war in Gaza, not as a topic itself. Please write at least a chapter about Traumacore (if not the whole thesis).

RL: What role can experimental or artistic practices (like video games, interactive installations) play in theorising or rethinking online grief and mental health today?

GL: This is context and generation-specific. The museum, gallery and biennales have been failing here. The 1990s gap between ‘contemporary arts’ and ‘new media arts’ remains (on top of the older hi-lo art division). What happens is that the young audiences are no longer bothered. A clear sign of this is the rise of influencer industries around Instagram and TikTok. This is so much more significant than this or that interactive installation. I do not follow the game industry, so I cannot answer your question in that respect. It is good to remember what economic model you’re aiming at. Crypto-art, formerly known as NFTs, is also a good indicator. All these models offer alternative ways of expression, yet do not deal with grief and mental issues as such. It’s also evident that we will learn much more about the role of AI chatbots in this context. They tend to mirror feelings—this is widely known. This can work in a particular stage, yet is somewhat limiting in the long run.

RL: Beyond the Internet Core (April 2025) event at Santa Monica/Hangar in Barcelona, and a few established references, there seems to be limited discourse around evolving online visual languages. Memes have been more explored; I’m referring instead to “internet aesthetic” images and the communities that form around them. Are there emerging scholars or artists you would point to as working critically in this space, or is this still an under-theorised field?

GL: Sure. This is a personal choice. I am not an expert in anything, as this is not part of my cultural logic in the first place. Bogna Konior first comes to mind. Then Melissa Broder had an all-time high. Recent newcomers would be Valentina Tanni and you. All women, right? It’s men’s business to deal with ‘real’ stuff (not the fluff) such as platform theory, infrastructures, datacentres, and war. This traditional gender division is a mere reflection of the sad and regressive state of the field and how tiny it all is (in comparison to the immensity of the issues that you are addressing).

I will not list any of those active in the INC context as I hate self-promotion. It also reflects the crisis in art and humanities funding (in comparison to the relative stability of the social sciences in our field, which have clearly benefited from the big data wave, the legal turn and then the AI hype). We know that the topics do not need to be invented. All core concepts are already out there. They just need to be theorised appropriately. No one will do that for us; this is our task. How are we going to organise this field? How do we encourage young people to take their own (online-offline) seriously? It is one to take Mark Fisher seriously. Zizek is another source of inspiration. So can Hegel memes. Fashionable theory tends not to go in this direction… While dark, accelerationist thinking tends to play mind games with the apocalypse, the type of thinking you’re looking for tends to be less sexy and more on the side of cultural diagnostics.

RL: In Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (2019), you suggest that memes function as a masked critical strategy. Could the rise of internet aesthetics such as weirdcore or liminal spaces (with their slow pace, anonymous user-generated nature, deliberate aesthetic intention, and use of image appropriation and remediation) be seen as a parallel form of countercultural production, responding to the fast, optimised, and generative aesthetics of mainstream platforms and AI systems?

GL: One could differentiate two aesthetic responses: the one that emphasises the void, the emptiness of it all. And the one that intensifies and pushes everything into a weird territory, goes all the generative, predictable responses into the absurd, and dives deep into the odd. Both flatness and the extreme try to escape that vast desert of mediocrity that tries to carry with the rational everyday responses that automated culture is generating for us. We’ll be bored soon with monstrous short videos. Again, the COVID period was pivotal in the making of such subcultures. We can now identify specific mechanisms for making extensive cultural contexts. This is the paradox: it is a hidden yet vast field. These are not ‘brat summer’ micro trends.

RL: Would it be appropriate to include these types of images (such as liminal spaces, traumacore, other internet aesthetics and even memes) within the framework of post-photography? Or do they demand a different conceptual or artistic approach that better accounts for their characteristics?

GL: What photography curators and magazine editors decide is in or out is their business. They can do whatever gatekeeping, but that’s not what you are talking about here. It’s often said that post-photography has to come up with viable responses to the automation of image production in which liminal webcams, the video game point of view of drones and the billions of smartphone recordings of situations produced daily together define the nature of what’s seen (which is no longer the televisual, cinema or photography). It’s hard to remember that most images produced today are not for human consumption. This wide collection of cold imagery does most of the harm. Yet, we find them hardest to read, or even to recognise them as such. In most cases, we do not ‘see’ anything. However, they watch us.

The case of reading memes is exceptional as they are weirdly generic. Many are standard and state the obvious, even while the meme is supposed to create a temporary disjuncture. Memes live off their contrast. One could get numbed, and then the ‘meme effect’ no longer works, but that’s not very likely. At best, memes are cultural commentary. They suddenly show up and disturb you. No doubt there will be a time ahead when the format as such will come out of fashion, but the nearly twenty years that they have been part of online culture and their presence has been remarkably stable, keeping a safe distance from the mainstream media. Meme culture has still not been appropriated, yet it is not more widespread.

RL: The original anthropological notion of liminality referred to transitional states of being, thresholds between phases or identities. Today, however, the term is widely used online to describe images of empty, unsettling spaces, often far removed from its original context. Terms like liminal spaces become so expansive that they risk losing conceptual clarity, but does it make sense to impose structured categories on internet aesthetics? Would it be more productive to propose new definitions or labels to better frame these phenomena, or should we instead focus on observing how such terms evolve organically within user communities, without trying to contain or overly categorise them? (This is one of the questions I’m trying to address in my research, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

GL: You are right. Liminal spaces are a generic or container concept, if you like. It stands for the emptiness of most urban spaces that people have to move through. I am in favour of intensifying such categories into neighbouring aesthetics that capture the techno-nihilism of the moment. First, we need to unsee the obvious. This is what happens to the selfie, which is not more than a pathetic contribution to the facial recognition databases nowadays. Then, start to see the unseen, the obvious, and the overlooked. Next is to become alert to the unknown visual/audio/textual spectres. Develop a radar system inside your own set of senses. The metaphor would be the apps you use to scan the night sky for stars and planets. Eventually, it will also be about the anti-drone drone. Many will have become suspicious of the invisible wireless spectre within a few years. This is the territory in which the paranoid will become democratised. A scary prospect, but a necessary one if you’re coming from the Burroughs and the post-industrial squatting era like me. This is the Paul Virilio ‘vision’ legacy we need to carry on.