Refresh, Renew proposes alternatives to the current funerary protocols for the channelling of ceremony both online and IRL. It manages the digital remains of a life lived online, matching the current multiplication of bodily images as they navigate online and persist after biological expiration. Common Accounts’ Refresh, Renew continues their line of research on the subject of architecture’s role in the intersection of death and daily-life. If the cemetery and the mausoleum are no longer the exclusive spaces for the funeral ever since the arrival of social media a little over a decade ago, this alteration the funerary social spheres has multiplied the spaces through which ceremony is channelled. 


By rearticulating gym traditions and technologies, Refresh, Renew focuses on the increasing production and circulation of bodies and their images and capitalizes on their capacity to construct vast personal archives as a project of eternalization. Recent cases of online funeral memorialization through the practice of fitness have brought to the surface a long historical lineage of the relationship between body-culture and death that span from the practice of athletics on Etruscan funerals to the development of contemporary mass fitness by the North American military apparatus. In this context, Facebook's first significant encounters with death —prompted by a fitness coach claiming access to the digital file of his dead son— shows the displacement of spaces of mourning to areas like the comments section of a YouTube channel, a home-gym, or muscle itself.