An Australian artist brings the death experience to reality with virtual reality headsets, allowing people to undergo how death would feel like in real life.
Technology like Virtual reality had opened the doors to experience something that we can’t in our real life. May it be reliving the past moments, or gaming VR headset that kills you in real life on losing the game, the tech brought unlikely strange encounters to be experienced in real life. Now, this exhibit in Australia shows people what could death be like in real time, through virtual reality.
The exhibit will get you death feel.
Death Experience Exhibit
Australian Artist Shaun Gladwell displays “Passing Electrical Storms” at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, that can conjure the process of dying through XR experience and medical technologies.
The exhibit creates a simulating experience of death with a dummy hospital setup, where it takes participants through instances of de-escalation of life, from cardiac arrest to brain death.
“At once meditative and unsettling, this interactive work guides participants through a simulated de-escalation of life,” writes in the exhibit’s tagline on the gallery site. Passing Electrical Storms experience offers an arresting contemplation of the universes both within and beyond the body.
Describing about the exhibit, it will simulate as if you are moving away from yourself (your body) and then floating off into the giant universe, Gladwell explains.
“By simulating death as an experience in its last few minutes, it’s a meditation on the ephemerality of individual life,” Gladwell told. “For me, it’s not all gloomy but a spectrum of colors and moods.”
Passing Electrical Storms was commissioned by the NGV and made possible with the support of a Research Partnership with Deakin Motion Lab, Deakin University.
Related Posts
A TikToker expounds the Experience
TikToker named Marcus shot the exhibit’s death experience to TikTok, commenting that “It makes you contemplate what happens after death”.
Marcus guided through the show, where we can see people lying on blue beds with their heads stuck in virtual reality simulators. Next to the beds are large computers likely as in hospital monitors, for faking out the experience to be real.
Explaining what it would be like aftermath a heart attack, the simulation inscribes every details that takes the situation to be more convincing.
“What happens is, you’re laying down, the bed vibrates, you flatline, the doctors come over the top of you, you can see yourself in the goggles, and they try to revive you,” Marcus told.
Adding, “It doesn’t work, then you float up past some, into space, and yeah it keeps going, but I won’t spoil it all.”
Death-like feel in the show will give you a sense of the scale of both universes within and outside of our bodies. He does mention that it could cause anxiety and panic, as the simulation might get real and convincing.
“If anything, it makes you marvel at the possibility of life in the first place.”
The Gallery exhibition is open now, till the 20th of August 2023 and the entry is free for the experience. If you get a chance to visit Melbourne, make sure you experience death via virtual reality.
Hope the page was useful to you! Drop your thoughts in the comments..
(For more such interesting informational, technology and innovation stuffs, keep reading The Inner Detail).