Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection

Press Kit

Unique Properties

Unfinished Farewell is an online space to commemorate the people who have left us because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When visitors enter each person's "tomb", they can see their stories and the help-seeking information they posted before they passed away, and leave a message.

There are various ways of visualizing the statistics of COVID, but none about individual’s story. This project provides one way for us to visualize and relate to death. Behind every number is a life.

Dimensions & Packaging

Screen resolution

Tags

COVID-19, commemorate, platform, pandemic, digital tomb

Production Technology

The particle system is written with three.js. The floating message inside each chamber is written with p5.js. We manually collected all the information of the deceased by contacting their families and from Weibo, to have a better understanding of each individual’s story.

Design Challenge

Website design: How to design the space to have a comparable feeling of visiting the physical tomb during a time that everybody has to stay at home. How to convey sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, and agony through a website interface and interactions.
Data collection: We collected the data through both algorithms and manually. We reached out to each person's family to gather information and their portraits. It was a very sad and tough communication process.
Surveillance: This project has been constantly surveilled by cyber police in China because any artworks related to the pandemic are considered "sensitive" topics. We set the server in the US to avoid being taken down by the "internet wall" in China. Our volunteers were harassed by police several times during the creation of this project.

Project Duration

Duration varies, online

Operation Flow

Here we try to gather the portrait for each deceased. You’ve never met this person, but their portrait is right in front of you, but then you realized that they’ve passed away. As soon as your finger lingers on the person’s face, it scatters and vanishes. You haven’t have a chance to really get to know this person, they just fade away. I designed the website this way so that when visitors enter this space, they can sense that sort of atmosphere: sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, agony. A comparable feeling that visitors can have as if they are physically visiting their tomb. This gives us much more understanding of death than the increasing statistics.

Enter each individual’s space by clicking “Farewell”. You can see the help-seeking information they posted before they passed away. You can leave a message. All the messages people sent here will float in the space. Here are some messages we’ve received since publishing:

“Do I need to shout loudly to be noticed?”,
"The best memory of the deceased is not to lose memory in your lifetime”,
"RIP, I hope you can change your job if you become policeman again.”, (This is a message to a cyber police who passed away out of overwork for deleting sensitive messages on the internet. )
“Can’t understand, don’t understand”, (to the whistleblower Doctor Li Wenliang)
"Because of your existence, I will always learn to love humankind.”,
"I hope I can at least know your name, not just the unknown name, may you rest in peace”,
“Yancheng, after you leave, your dad and brother still push your wheelchair to eat together with you”,
"No freedom to speak, no freedom to die”.

Someone uploaded her grandmother's information who passed away to our website, and wrote how much she misses her: “Thank you, grandma, and thank you for seeing me as more than your life. Grandma, you must take care of yourself. Please rest assured and I will take care of this home. Grandma, I really miss you, Grandma, I love you.”

This project has been exhibited in OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, 2020, “Let This Moment Be Transformative“, and Uncertainties: PRD Post-pandemic Contemporary Art Exhibition, Macao, 2020. South China Morning Post’s Inside China Tech podcast interviewed me about this project on the topic "How technology has changed the way we die and mourn”.

Research

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and the number of deaths continues to rise, the heartbreaking experiences are being replaced by collective mourning. As German journalist and pacifist Kurt Tukholsky said: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic".
When we look back at the help-seeking posts of those lost, those who waited to die because of unconfirmed testing; those whose death certificates were being tampered with; those who committed suicide out of despair; those non-COVID patients whose life-saving medical treatment was foregone… None of them were included in the death toll, and are likely to be forgotten over time. They didn’t have a fair medical treatment during their lifetime, and they were not mentioned after their death. The same is true for many frontline workers who lost their lives due to infection or overwork.
While connecting with families of those lost, one daughter asked: “After this pandemic, who can remember the pain of someone like my mother who had nowhere to seek medical treatment, was refused by the hospital, and died at home?" This is one of the reasons why we built this online platform, trying to document as many people who have left us because of the pandemic as possible. The website also includes the help-seeking information they posted before they passed away, which is the evidence they left to this era. We hope to provide a space for family members to release their grief and for the public to mourn.
Behind every number is a life.

Inspiration

We designed the website this way so that when visitors enter this space, they can sense that sort of atmosphere: sorrow, grief, solemn, melancholy, mourning, agony. A comparable feeling that visitors can have as if they are physically visiting their tomb. This gives us much more understanding of death than the increasing statistics.

Image Credits

Jiabao Li

Colors of Unfinished Farewell Immersive Projection

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