Mirroring Loss creates a one-person experience to contextualize our loss during the Covid-19 pandemic by referring the loss of lives to the vanishment of self-reflection in the mirror. It is created in the background of a year that caught us unprepared. This project encourages people to pause their anxiety and reminds them that the year of 2020 essentially signifies the sudden loss of millions of lives.
Mirroring Loss approaches the concept of death in a novel, artistic and timely manner, visualizing over one year of covid death data in a one-minute self-reflective and meditative experience. It aims to challenge the problematic prejudices and their dominance on mentality during the ongoing global crisis: contagious disease, shutdown of schools and shops, people losing jobs, etc. We are sometimes buried in such chaos, the distress and anger, while forgetting that the year 2020 signifies the sudden loss of lives, those who could have more time. Mirroring Loss is designed to help its users pause their anxious thoughts and contextualize loss, to reclaim empathy for one another.To create such an experience, Mirroring Loss primarily constructs theoretical frameworks to touch on people’s psychological movements, and secondly utilizes digital media technologies to create an aesthetic, interactive process. Firstly, this project redefines the daily activity of looking into a mirror, building upon relevant research that a mirror resembles a tool to connect one’s inner thoughts and lead to a process of exploring the mind. It presents a generative particle art piece visualizing the death toll inside a “mirror”–an interface built with digital screens mimicking an ordinary mirror. The particles will gather according to the user’s body image and create a virtual human figure reflecting in the mirror, representing the human body and life. The figure will gradually get more and more incomplete in an artistic way to represent the loss of lives through the spread of the disease.
Secondly, this project visualizes 17 months of worldwide accumulated death data by 12 sequences, showing the tendencies of loss of lives and turning it into a meditative ritual for farewell. When the user’s body is formed, the process of data visualization will begin. The particles will fall from above and accumulate on the ground in a ratio to death increase, a process to watch one’s self in the mirror dissolve piece by piece. Finally, there are only dead pieces on the ground with the total death data remaining on the screen, corresponding with a soil cemetery display around the digital mirror. In a way, a visual representation of the user will experience death in the project of Mirroring Loss under the larger background of covid-19 pandemic. Its ultimate goal speaks directly to the realization that, everyone is waiting for this crisis to end, and everyone is preparing for a collective moment to honor death, for which some of us have waited too long. In the end, the user will realize: Mirroring Loss does more than mirroring death, it is revealing the loss in ourselves.
Tags:#death#computervision#interactiveart