The Second Burial of Hyman Victor
The Second Burial of Hyman Victor is an exploration of both modern religious behavior in America and the way new media is used in our culture as a proxy for memory. Malkin's residency will be used to create a next-generation gravestone, a remote display of the entry the artist made for his great-grandfather, Hyman Victor, in the International Genealogical Index, a publicly-accessible database of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City.

What is GEDCOM?
In the mid-1980's, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormon Church) developed the GEDCOM data structure to streamline their vast collection of genealogical information. An important reason for their interest in genealogy stems from their belief in vicarious baptism, a practice in which members of The Church are baptized on behalf of the deceased, a ritual by proxy for any individual known to have ever walked the earth. Such is the stature of The Church in the genealogical arena that GEDCOM soon became the de facto standard for storing such information, and so it has come that the life of a Russian Jewish immigrant carpenter, who arrived on the South Side of Chicago around the turn of the century, is communicated to posterity according to this file format.

Project Background
Having never met and knowing very little about Hyman Victor, the artist's great-grandfather, Malkin endeavored to learn more about his life. The outcome of that research is contained in a GEDCOM file, which Malkin produced using popular desktop genealogy software. As The Church welcomes submissions to the International Genealogical Index, he uploaded the file via their public web site as a way of contributing to the record of man and further securing his great-grandfather's memory. However, given that these annals of mankind are stored on databases run by the Mormon Church, the memorial runs the risk of prompting a vicarious baptism, a prospect Malkin aims to neutralize by incorporating the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, into the notational section of his GEDCOM file.

Conceptual Background
GEDCOM files are strings of colorless facts, a skeleton around which one can construct the narrative of a life. Standard graves, likewise, house little by way of information above the surface of the ground but serve as a public testament to an individual's life. If we think about a digital cemetery, rows of servers in vaults below a mountain in Utah (the IGI is in fact housed in a vault beneath Granite Mountain outside Salt Lake City), it raises the possibility of combining this type of electronic burial with its traditional counterpart. The Second Burial of Hyman Victor then, in this sense, is a next generation gravestone - a networked memorial to the electronic record of a man. The slate of marble at the head of Hyman Victor 's grave outside of Chicago features a stoic black and white portrait. His second gravestone, however, will feature a remote display of his Kaddish-infused GEDCOM data.

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