Commemorative stickers: A repurposing of an ephemeral medium

This paper explores the use of bumper-stickers to commemorate the dead. Commemoration stickers have become a widespread phenomenon in Israel since the October 7 attack and subsequent war: posted on various surfaces in public spaces, they memorialize victims of terror-attacks or fallen soldiers through a photograph alongside short texts, and often a QR code linking to online content about the deceased. Using this medium for this purpose is counterintuitive, because stickers are an ephemeral medium whereas commemoration usually assumes permanency. This tension between the medium and its purpose leads our analysis of the media-logic of these stickers. We argue that these stickers present post-digital commemoration practices, enacting the media-logic of online digital media in the offline realm, concurrently intensifying connectivity as a recursive link between their offline existence and online commemoration content. As commemorative media, stickers gravitate between communicative ritual and transmission, re-entangle time-space biases and reshape contemporary commemoration practices.