Postal mail, digital platforms and exhibitions: Mobilizing publics to end the carceral state

The Illinois Deaths in Custody Project (IDCP), an initiative including artists, scholars and community-based organizations, uses an interactive website to serve as both exhibit and memorial, and to document, archive, mourn, and share findings about the causes and rates of death of people in custody in Illinois since 2010. This chapter probes the contradiction that online activism is promising and inherently limited: Mourning is a public practice, but prisons obscure deaths, keeping grief, too, locked inside. Further, democratizing information-sharing technologies are banned within these institutions. Through collaborative research IDCP aims to erode boundaries between the physical and digital, the grievable and ungrievable, and official and personal narratives of death and mourning. Countering oppositional dichotomies and hierarchies of privileged hackers and knowledge-holders offering access to subjugated recipients, this text explores how participatory digital methods and forms can reshape the meanings, practices and boundaries of public mourning, and challenge the carceral state.