I feel like i’m finally making some headway with this project.
In the weeks since finishing my context report, i froze and pretended like everything was ok. My main issues were the actual design element of the project; the outcome/an outcome/something to show in the quite frankly vast show space (which we went to look at this week which finally kick started me into fruitful work). It’s at this point that having my two year sabbatical from the degree puts me at a bit of disadvantage.. Not being used to doing this kind of work for a while makes me have a very unsettled and unbalanced work routine, swinging violently from research to design when a deadline approaches.
Back at week one in october, I was convinced that i was going to design a machine that makes your voice go on forever.. i daydreamed of building it in a dessert in america as that was the only place big enough to do it and all the american companies that sponsored me insisted i did it there.. utterly crazy.
Then i felt i had to slow down my designing to focusing on research and the context report, so i began reading a lot and designing next to nothing (just little experiments like the ones you can read about on this blog).
ANYWAYS, with all the work i have done recently concerning the afterlife and designing for Dante, i was constantly thinking about where it was heading. I also felt like hell/sins has been done too much before, not to mention the fact i myself was beginning to get bored with it (which im sure is a problem at this stage of any project).
I’m still very much into the idea of the afterlife and living forever, but i just needed a new angle on it. So re-winding back to the death process and grieving (of which i wrote a big chapter about in my report), i began thinking about ways in which death can be a positive thing for someones life. i had an idea a few months ago about wind-powered musical instruments (based on a belief that dead souls go into the world, “i am the thousand winds that blow”) and how you could learn an instrument in collaboration with the deceased.
so in this, i want to make death part of everyday life. i want to encourage people to embrace grief as a way to better themselves and improve their lives. think about what the deceased person is giving them and what they can achieve with it (which is where the living on after your death comes into it: you’re afterlife is the the self-improvement of other people).
one important part of the grieving process is crying. doing some research about crying i learnt that when you cry “emotionally”, there are a plethora of hormones that your body expels. as there are so many, there are a multitude of avenues for design interventions: prolactin (and its effects on testosterone and that huge area), oleamide (which relates to sleep), corticotropin (stress) and sodium, potassium and manganese (salt based nutrients). the one that has caught my eye first is prolactin which is a very interesting amino acid. just one of the things that prolactin does when its in a male body is lower testosterone. having lowered testosterone is unhelpful for many reasons, and if you’re, for example, an athlete, you’ll experience decreased performance. so crying out all these hormones can actually make you better and eventually more healthy.
so with this in mind, wouldn’t it be more useful to cry before the game, rather than after it?
