Photography was the first Thanatechnology developed.

In an epoch in which death prevailed over life while Enlightenment shattered the certainties of an Afterlife — photography was the ideal medium to resist death's anxieties. The bond between photography and death was particularly palpable in the Victorian picture portraits in which life is often a masquerade: the child cradled in the mother's arms seems peacefully dozing but never wakes up crying again. Photographs were a rare occurrence, and death was the only moment an individual could have the privilege to be immortalised in them. The medium became the testimony of existence, the last record of social presence — hence the need to mimic life in the frame. Photographs as post-Poussin's tombs, engraved with the same inscription: "Et in Arcadia Ego". Words to signify that the person photographed once lived in Arcadia, to let the dead subject offer the truth: "Me too, I was once in Arcadia, but now I have dissolved (as you will)". Heralds of an unequivocal concept: if my body is doomed to become dust and my non-existent soul is to wreck in a vacuous ocean of nothingness, at least this so-called photography will endure time, and myself along with it as its subject. My image — the only trace left — will survive in the generational memory of those who have yet to come. Cameras arose from the need to record time — to give it a materiality — to avoid losing the self within it. Photography — its value, its function — from the short circuit of a conscious encased in the rigid frameworks of time and a timeless unconscious free to disregard the absolute end. Jung found interesting dynamics when analysing old age patients close to their death. Even when confronted with the imminent future, the subjects still looked towards the day after, even though the tomorrow had already faded. Death in the mirror is closer than it appears. You must never look back; otherwise, the oblivion will be visible ahead and petrify your (un)conscious mind. Every photograph is a mirror in which your existential anxieties are encapsulated; they are physical projections to alleviate your suffering — every snapshot frees your mind. Once the photographic ritual to immortalise your life ends, the myriad of pictures taken get lost in cloud storage, never to be seen again.

As Tezcatlipoca told Smithson: "[...] camera is a portable tomb, you must remember that."

Sontag wrote that photographs turn the present into the past and contingencies in destiny, but I do not agree — the present turns into the past naturally; it's a constant existential occurrence — photography is just a method to measure it. Photography is taxidermy of life — to slice and stuff with living memories — yet, as the museum's stuffed animals, still lifeless objects. In this logic of contraposition, in capturing reality and conquering death, photography has its limit — the lack of dynamism. A paucity supplanted by the latter motion pictures — nevertheless another illusion. The moving images are just multiple slices — multiple lifeless animals — playing one after the other — still, captured, immobile life's frames. As such, I must also disagree with Professor Bulgaraux's lecture that asserts, "Life is a movie. Death is a photograph." — a movie is simply death's repetition — the litany of the same fragment of life. It does not hold any novelty; it just echoes itself without changing the slightest wordage. The moving images are hells, made of videotaped subjects condemned to replay the exact moment repeatedly — without end. It is in videos that contingencies become destiny. In the multiple replays, the subjects are empty shells, unconscious that there is No Exit. Through Antonino's words, Calvino explains — anticipating the camera mania of the 21st century — how photo obsession is an "excess of life" that steers away from the moment, paradoxically from life itself. A society that sees life passing by through a screen in the compulsion to photograph it — in an eternal moment — is a society that fails to understand the essence of life. A society bonded to death, ignoring that the true spirit of being is found in its ephemerality; its beauty is to be a temporary anomaly. We became collectors of life's moments, not living of the moment. This is the plague of the contemporary individual deprived by religion and overwhelmed by materialism — left alone to grasp salvation. The hyper-materialistic system imposed is sustainable only if the images' cycle of production/consumption relentlessly flows — every device has a camera, and everything can take a picture — to contain the anxiety this system generates: only this reality exists and only its representations matter. Today is not enough anymore — in post-capitalism — the limit is being reached: more materialism is praised, more potent death anxieties become, and thus superior technologies are needed. Here is where I then place l'avant-garde of digitalisation, the virtualisation of reality — VR, the AR, the META — at the top as the pinnacle of consumerism, of the Capitalistic machine that is exhausting commodifying-apt material and, as such, is forsaken to consume and commodify reality itself at the core. Here is where the simulation crosses any line and is paired with the power of AI synchronised with memories in the form of data left behind and an Afterlife offered. It is the ultimate attempt to defy time and death to contain, once and for all, death anxiety overflows.

Tezcatlipoca spoke again to Smithon. In foreseeing the future, it proclaimed: "The true fiction eradicates the false reality."

The deceitful reality of a materialistic world is that your death is the termination of your existence. It is a lie, and it is being shattered by the truthful fabrication that materialism can be your infinite existence. Everything is about to change; everything is tipped over. The once existing are being dislocated in the virtual space; empty digital shells are reconstructed in their persona, their emptiness filled with AI responding to memories — hybrids of truth — to be again alive, create new destinies again, new narratives — always different — there are no more limits and us existing, architects and participants of it. The virtual space donates complete control, which is why it is so fascinating and dangerous at the same time; individuals are inevitably dragged towards it. It is an upgraded reality, the land of dreams. Everything is possible. Feuerbach's statements made more than a century ago, translated in this contemporary context, assume a prophetic significance: "[our era] prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being". Your reality is a constant lack; your land of dreams, the Real. The democratisation of 3D scanners, photogrammetry software and AI networks results from the market offer and demand. Simply what already happened to photography and video — I see a technological evolution more than a conceptual evolution — a refinement of a déjà vu. The portable tomb is becoming the portable crypt. While progress marvels the masses and a brighter future is foreseen, the virtualisation of the living leads to an organic impasse: what is a subject, and what is an object? What contains the virtual object/subjects — the hybrid of truth? I am made of memories; memories are my consciousness; my soul as such is composed — the conglomeration of who I am — what will I be?

The ordinated timeline of pictures, articulation of life, is scattered — no time, dates, or years — just a suspended present in which the past can be mixed with the present and its future. Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists to end in a book; Sotang said everything exists to end in a photograph; I say: today, everything exists to end in virtuality.