Scripture, photography and film have made it possible to record various kinds of information, but the internet may cause an even bigger revolution in conceptual identity preservation. The Live.on.line-project is based on the idea that the arrival of the internet has opened up new possibilities to preserve your conceptual identity, and above all, make it relevant for future generations. Libraries full of diaries will not be read much. No matter how well sorted the bookshelves are, the parts you’d want to read would be pretty hard to find. The same goes for videos and photos. You would have to work your way through a lot of irrelevant information until you’d find what you were looking for. The internet, and especially search engines like Google, has tackled this problem partially. Finding pieces of information about people has become relatively easy, but finding out what kind of person somebody is, his or her views of life and ways of living, is almost impossible.

Virtual identities like they exist today in the form of blogs and other sites remain superficial, and above all, not very clarifying. Relevant information about people is often spread across many different web pages or hidden deep inside large amounts of text.

Live.on.line will make it possible to store large amounts information about almost every thinkable aspect of one’s life, in such a way that it can and will be found, now and in the future, by people to whom it is relevant.

The word ‘virtual’ can refer to a sort of non-realness or conceptuality, but that is not its full meaning. Nowadays, the word is usually mentioned in computer-context. This is because computers are particularly good in creating things that seem real, but are not. Computers simulate. They translate actual things in to virtual things. The meaning of the words ‘virtual you’ is thus not only ‘non-real representation of you’ or ‘conceptual you‘, but can also be described as your ‘digital- or online-identity’. It can be described as every findable trace of your presence on the internet. Almost everyone who uses the internet regularly leaves behind pieces of information about himself in various forms. People post on blogs and make use of social networking sites. This information could already provide a superficial impression of what kind of person someone is, though not in much detail. Your virtual identity may very well already exist in some form. But what is it worth and will it last?

Your conceptual identity is your place in the inter-conceptual world. One’s conceptual identity consists roughly of two parts. The first part is the ‘image’ or ‘idea’ that you have of yourself and the world around you, the second part is formed by the ‘images’ or ‘ideas’ that others have of you. In short, your conceptual identity consists of all the existing thoughts about you.

Just as the computer is affecting the inter-conceptual world, it is also affecting our conceptual identities. Because of the computer, and especially the internet, information is easily distributed and accessible from any given place. That means that our conceptual identity can travel around the globe with the speed of light, and people at the other side of the world can come to know of your existence within minutes. The virtual you travels ahead of yourself.

Your personal-conceptual-world is the collection of all your thoughts and ideas. Every thinking entity has its own world of concepts. The size of this personal thought collection can be said to correspond with the amount of thinking that could, in theory, be done by the owner of the collection. A worm for instance can be safely said to have a very small personal conceptual world. The personal conceptual world of, say, a cat, will be considerably larger, and that of a human even more so. Indeed, humans probably have the largest personal conceptual worlds of all known living species, though it is hard and maybe even impossible to test that hypothesis.

The exact composition of one’s personal conceptual world differs per individual. Everyone has his own unique thought collection, as it gets shaped by experience. Individuals that share many experiences will differ less from each other than those who haven’t got any shared experiences at all. But there is another way in which personal conceptual worlds can become more congruent and in tune with each other. That is by communication.

Communication allows us synchronize our thoughts. It allows us to have what we can call the shared- or inter-conceptual world. Again Homo Sapiens is not at all the only species that makes use of communication to share parts of their personal thought collection, although the extent to which we do it is probably unique to our kind. By making use of language we are able to exchange an almost limitless amount of information to other members of our species. Furthermore, ever since the invention of scripture, the information doesn’t need to be actively transferred a short moment before the time at which the information is received. It can be stored, read and duplicated.

The arrival of the computer, and with it the internet, has had and is still having the effect of synchronizing our personal conceptual worlds even more, resulting in an inter-conceptual world that grows, and grows quicker every moment. The ways in which we communicate are getting more and more elaborate.

The word virtual in virtual immortality refers to a sort of non realness, although it is not exactly the opposite of realness. Some software, for instance, is called virtual machine software. This software is not a real, physical machine like the hardware of the computer, but it can be understood as if it were the physical hardware of a computer. In reality only the idea of a machine with components working together to form a result exist; the actual software consist of a nothing but magnetic fields and electric currents, forming a row of zeroes and ones that tell the real computer what to do. In other words, by virtual things we mean things that consist of mere ideas, concepts without corresponding physical entities. What then, can virtual immortality mean?

Real, physical immortality is of course impossible. There is a continuum though, a gradient if you like, between complete mortality and complete immortality. For a fruit fly with a life that lasts a single day, a human with an average life expectancy of well over seventy years can seem pretty immortal. To us, some trees that are known to be at least twice as old as Christianity can seem pretty immortal. But the most immortal beings of our world are probably the ones that ‘reproduce’ by growth instead of replication. The plants and fungi that use this method of ‘reproduction’, keep making new roots to feed new branches, which in their turn make new roots. When one part of the plant dies of age, other parts are still young and happily alive. The oldest example that has been found has just celebrated its 43.000^th birthday.

But is this really the same individual as it was four hundred and thirty centuries ago? Its shape, size and position have changed over the eons. All the cells of which the plant was made in that prehistoric time have died long ago. The only thing that has remained the same of the plant that begun its life in the last ice-age is its concept. Its general idea. Its genes.

Genes are virtually immortal. The oldest genes in your body are the ones that you share with all the other living things on this planet, and they are well over half a billion years old. At least, their structure, their form, their concept is.

Virtual immortality can best be summarized as : The ability to exist forever in conceptual form

I am a student at the Hogeschool van de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU), and since the beginning of the schoolyear of 2007/2008 I do an interimship at a company called Cellspace, lokated in Amsterdam at the NDSM terrain. In October ’07 I met one of the fouders of Cellspace, Minne Belger, at a project exhibition at school. He asked me to be in charge of a project he had been planning on since 2001. The project would be called Deathlog (later on, we would change the name into 1ive0n1ine, to give it a more positive swing) The goal of the project would be to investigate the possibilities of something that he called Virtual Immortality.

The reason he had began the thinking procces that would eventually lead to the beginning of the 1ive0n1ine project was impersonated in Alex de Jong, Buddhist priest and co-founder of Cellspace. In 2001, he heard the terrible news that he suffered from an incurable form of cancer. He wouldn’t have much time left. Talking about this with Minne, the idea of Virtual Immortality arose. Alex is a frequent internet user, as well as a busy blogger (his blog is at http://scanr.net). For many years he has roamed the internet, visiting sites, leaving comments, posting blogs. “Afer I die, what will remain of me on the internet?” he asked himself. And with that question, it all began. The goal of the project then called Deathlog would be to gather this information, and make it into something that would remain active online, even after one’s death.

That is where I came into the game. My objective would be to try and find out what was needed to pull this seemingly outrageous idea from thoughtspace into reality…

The first problem I encountered was this: Although, until now, I haven’t been much of a blogger, I too, have left a trail of digital footprints. Scattered all over the internet, is the proof of my online existence. But what does this information really say about me?

To be continued…