MASTABA: the household shrine in the future archived digital pictures
Year
2006
Abstract
Recently, the styles of gravestones in Japan are changing. For ex- ample, someone made a sculpture of piano, which was his hobby, as his grave. In another case, someone made a com- pact plate made of remains of the deceased, instead of making his grave. These phenomenons show that the meaning of a grave in Japan is changing. The traditional Japanese graves have been eternal places where ancestors sleep. Some modern Japanese graves are the things or places for their family and posterity to remember and hand down the memory of ancestors. These show, today, that many Japanese people think that archiving dead’s memories is more important than the place where dead lies itself. And we think that these modern graves should be called ”family shrines”. We designed MASTABA as the future family shrine. We suppose that the future family shrine will be consist of digital memories of ancestors with a wooden physical structure. Digital memories are eternal, but a physical shape of MASTABA is not eternal.
