Presentation short abstract

Digital media reshape how extinction is witnessed, mourned, and imagined. Using Sudan and the megalodon as cases, this paper examines how simulations, films, and online publics generate new ecological narratives of care, grief, and technological substitution

Presentation long abstract

In the Anthropocene, extinction has become both an ecological reality and a cultural event, increasingly mediated through digital technologies. This paper examines how digital media reshape ecological narratives of care, grief, and control by producing “digital afterlives” for vanished or vanishing species. Drawing on two contrasting cases—the death and digital resurrection of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, and the cinematic revival of the prehistoric megalodon in The Meg—the study explores how technological substitutions transform how extinction is experienced and understood.

Sudan’s highly publicised death in 2018 generated global mourning, with images and videos circulating widely across social media and becoming sites of collective ethical reflection. His subsequent digital reanimation in Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s installation The Substitute presents a hyperreal virtual rhino that embodies presence and absence simultaneously, unsettling the perceived finality of extinction. In parallel, blockbuster cinema deploys CGI to resurrect the megalodon as a spectacular, fictional predator, offering a contrasting mode of substitution that emphasises thrill and spectacle rather than care or mourning.

Using a multimodal, multi-sited qualitative approach—including online discourse analysis, film analysis, and in-gallery observation—the paper traces how digital doubles blur the boundaries between life, loss, memory, and simulation. It argues that digital technologies now function as cultural and epistemic tools that reconfigure how extinction is narrated, witnessed, and emotionally processed. These mediated substitutions reveal emerging ethical and affective landscapes in which extinction is not only observed but imaginatively negotiated through digital forms