Monumental Death
Monumental Death is an interactive installation that asks audiences to witness and embody the heroic death, as represented by monuments and popular media. The installation invites a participant to fall and rise, which triggers the inflation and deflation of an anti-monument. The rise of one requires the fall of the other; this materially implicates the participant in a system that uses heroic, nationalist ideals to justify militaristic violence.
// interaction design
// installation design
// choreography
// writing
Accompanying the anti-monument is a movement score for animating death, which is both reflective and generative. The score defines the choreography of the heroic death, performed by the faller and the monument, while also allowing for users to express their own variations of falling choreography.
Monumental Death contributes to a larger commentary on choreographies of falling and dying, and how such choreographies interface with design. On an individual level, the heroic death trains the body, designing its shape, motions, and capabilities. Societally, it contributes to the design of the heroic subject as one to aspire to and embody. Choreography and design work together in this project to co-construct a trope of monumental proportions: a masculinized heroics that lives in the body and in nationalist social memory. As a designed interaction, this work forces audiences to confront the bodily performance in nationalist propaganda, as a visceral, personal reflection and a provocation to design.
“An impulse to find a one or the other answer, to look for the fall’s virtue in opposition to its failures, is itself a dead-end exercise. The fall is co-constituted by both liberation and manipulation, and exists where they intersect… Each iteration poses as grandeur, drama, resiliency or pathways to winning; each reiteration still trains normative, gendered—and, deadly— patterns, propping up a cultural story of heroism that is ultimately illusory.”
Excerpted from “Doing it Justice: Antimonuments and Deflated Heroics in Choreographies of Death.”
Graduate Thesis Paper
The Sublime Grandeur of Inconsequential Death is a Media Design Practices graduate thesis project, advised by Anne Burdick & Sam Creely.
Fabrication support for the inflatable from Bill Kennedy.
Special thanks as well for additional advising and creative support from Elizabeth Chin, Tim Durfee, & Michelle Ellsworth.