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Curated Immortality

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction The desire for immortality is not new. When viewed through the lens of human biology, the fear of death seems to be not only a natural side effect of the survival drive, but also deeply and irrevocably intertwined with a fear of loss, of grieving, both for oneself and for others. As a result, human beings have invented a wide range of technologies intended to defy the natural process of decay. Photography, analogue music technologies, and videography, for instance, all attempt to freeze a moment in time. More recently, projects such as Project December have extended this impulse into the digital realm, offering the bereaved a means of sustaining conversation with lost loved ones. Problems arise, however, when we project ourselves into a not-so-distant reality, such as the one found in Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime (2014), where death and the notion of mortality are challenged by the existence of Primes. This article engages with the reconceptualisation of immortality from the preservation of bodies or consciousness to a project of curated memory. Rather than extending life, artificial machines extend stories and narratives, functioning as embodied archives that maintain relational presence through selective remembrance. We ask questions about whose interests immortality serves and who controls the stories that endure. The Making of Immortal Primes In Marjorie Prime, Primes are artificially intelligent robots whose existence centres around the post-death preservation of a human being. Their appearances are designed to resemble that of their originator, and they are fed the memories and experiences of the people they are meant to embody. In many ways, Primes are living archives. They do not, however, exist as an educational resource in the way we might think of traditional archives, which are intended to store and inform about the past. The purpose of the Prime is not solely to contain the knowledge and experiences of an individual, but to physically embody them, recreate them—become them. If loss and grief are linked to an individual’s absence, Primes act as physical placeholders, slotting into these moments of absence to circumvent the grieving process. However, the concept of a Prime is rather ambiguous, as it does not fall neatly into transhuman and posthuman concepts, unlike much of the science fiction work dealing with subject matter relating to robotic or artificially intelligent figures. At the heart of both transhumanism and posthumanism is a desire to enhance humanity and prevent the extinction of the human race, i.e., to challenge human vulnerability and to defeat death. The ultimate goal is for human development to have a positive, directly proportional relationship to time and temporality, and for this to be possible, there must be a guarantee of immortality. One of the key differences between transhumanism and posthumanism lies in how they define the human being. For transhumanists, the biological aspect of the human still plays an important role, though there is an acknowledgement of the limitations of biology. As defined by Martin Sand and Karin Jongsma, transhumanists “envision a future that brings about a decline of our physical and mental boundaries as compared to today. The unpleasantness of all physical constraints—including diseases, senescence and death—should be overcome” (293). It is important to note that the individual’s consciousness is maintained; it continues. The goal is to defy corporeal finitude so that consciousness may persist, but biology is not viewed solely as a limitation. Although transhumanists often regard it as something that can be improved, rectified, or transformed, biology nevertheless remains central to transhumanist thought, as part of the metaphysical conception of the human continues to reside within the biological body. Donna Haraway’s concept of a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, is, for example, considered closer to transhuman than to posthuman because of its continued relation to biology. Posthumanists, in contrast, question the centrality of human biology. There is an understanding that at a certain point, the limitations of biology will hinder human development, and so what defines the human being—the body, the brain, consciousness—begins to shift. The human subject becomes malleable rather than fixed or immediately tangible. This transformation can manifest in a number of ways. Karen Barad’s intra-action explains how posthuman beings emerge through their intricate entanglements and dynamic interactions among bodies, machines, environments, and systems of meaning. Additionally, as Myra J. Seaman notes, the posthuman subject is often imagined as an extension or cessor to the universal human, emerging through technoscientific developments that seek to move cognition beyond the limits of the biological body (247). If biology traditionally defines humanness, then the posthuman project imagines human development moving beyond strictly biological existence and becoming increasingly intertwined with nonhuman systems. Nevertheless, the concept of consciousness often lies at the root of the aforementioned approaches. Transhuman and posthuman immortality both involve extending an individual’s consciousness, though the methodology of doing so might differ. Transhumanists focus on technology extending the lifespan of the corporeal body, in a sense, the biological container for one’s consciousness. Posthumanists, on the other hand, envision a transference of consciousness beyond the body into a technological framework, as in Rosi Braidotti’s concept of technological mediation of human subjects. But for both, the preservation of consciousness builds a path to immortality. This is what makes the concept of Primes distinct: there is no attempt to extend the consciousness of one who has passed, but rather to create a vessel through which the said individual’s stories, experiences, and relationships can be reinstalled and continue to exist in tangible form. Thus, Primes are neither truly transhuman nor posthuman in their approach to immortality, as the latter two place greater emphasis on the subject’s personal inquiry: how can I extend my own life? My own consciousness? In the case of Primes, this shifts the question to: who and what does the Prime exist for? Primes act less as the continuation of someone for the sake of their own desire for immortality, but rather as grieving aids for those who are experiencing the pain of losing a loved one. Memories Curated In the opening scene of Marjorie Prime, the audience encounters an elderly woman, Marjorie, with her 30-year-old-looking husband, Walter. Time is taking its toll, and Marjorie’s memory is deteriorating. The two exchange turns from the mundane to a shared memory: a trip to see the movie My Best Friend’s Wedding. They recall Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz; Marjorie asks whether she liked the film. Walter replies that she once said she wanted a gay best friend afterwards. “Did I get one?” she asks. In response, his tone shifts—“faintly generic”—as he answers, “I’m afraid I don’t have that information”, before resuming a warmer affect and adding that it was the day he proposed to her (Harrison 9). This is the moment we realise that this is not Walter but Walter Prime, a lifelike duplicate of Marjorie’s dead husband, meant to comfort an ageing Marjorie. Jon, Marjorie’s son-in-law, says to his wife Tess, “Senior Serenity says companionship is the most important / thing” (14) in reference to Walter Prime, implying his existence is in some way comparable to the companionship offered by the real Walter before his death. Walter Prime is not Walter resurrected; he is a regression of Walter, whose decades of ageing and experience have somehow been wiped out, and then selectively reinstalled. Walter Prime’s memories are malleable and manipulated throughout the play to best serve Marjorie. The opening scene stages memory not as retrieval but as calibration. Walter’s temporary lapse exposes the mechanism beneath intimacy: he is learning, storing, adjusting and reproducing information through guided interaction. The exchange resembles the basis of machine learning and how people train their AI tools nowadays in miniature. Through repetition, correction, and supplementation, often provided by Tess and Jon, Marjorie and Walter Prime piece together fragments of memories that may have been fading or lost due to the former’s ageing and the latter’s passing. The Prime gradually becomes a more coherent version of Walter and increasingly guides the story of Marjorie’s life. Memory here is not recovered from a stable archive; it is collaboratively assembled. Primes are always role-playing, and memory is inherently performative in Marjorie Prime. The latter is rehearsed, edited, and continually revised, involving both repetition and recollection. Patrick Hutton distinguishes the two: “Repetition concerns the presence of the past ... . Recollection concerns our present efforts to evoke the past” (xx–xxi). In the play, the two are inseparable. Walter repeats stories fed to him, but each repetition is already recollection, filtered through present desire, omission, and new inputs. Thus, this living archive of memory is constantly changing to serve the people engaging with it. This resonates with Jacques Derrida’s argument that “the question of the archive is not a question of the past … but a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (27). The Prime embodies this future-oriented memory work precisely. Walter Prime does not preserve the past as it was; instead, he materialises what the living decide will endure. The archive is no longer a repository but a promise, a curated projection shaped by present needs. The idea of remembering as selective and curated becomes more conspicuous when Marjorie’s consciousness gradua
Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3277
Institution: New York University
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7165486516
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