SILENCE
AND END
OF LIFE
Year
2018
An investigation and visualization of silence during end of life.
INTRO
When inquiring about crisis moments during end of life that could lead us to possible spaces for intervention, we investigated and drafted scenes around the ever present silence during end of life.
Silence might occur in situations like:
- Right before / after terminal diagnosis for patient
- Moment of crisis when patient’s heart or breathing stops
- Long periods of waiting when patient is unconscious or asleep
- Moment of silence in hospital when visitors arrive
Reasons for silence:
- Denial / processing what is happening
- Fear
- Confusion or inability to think straight
IDEA
Silence seems to be the absence of something – of noise, of interaction, of emotion. However, there’s a lot that is just noch visible to the eye.
PROTOTYPE
Our prototype is an interactive video, coded with processing and java script. It works through sound detection. During silence, an image is generated and ever evolving into more and more colors. However, every time a sound occurs, the video will react by deleting the image and starting a new one.
We drafted dialogues based on the scenes in which silence might occur that we detected during our research process. We then read them out loud and had the video react to it. It became a real-time performance of the visualization of silence.
