Art and Creativity

Your Virtual Death – Kelly Sinclair Vicars at TEDxStanford
What does it mean to be mortal? That’s the question artist Kelly Vicars set out to answer with an art show exploring the use of virtual reality. People who come close to dying often express the feeling that it changed their lives for the better, she says. How can VR and art help us experience death without actually dying?

Kelly Vicars is an artist and creative producer. In 2016, she and her team at Dream Logic produced “The Art of Dying,” a 3-day immersive art show featuring artists from around the world who are using virtual reality, augmented reality, music, and interactive experiences to explore what it means to be mortal. Vicars works on large-scale experiential art projects incorporating storytelling, visual art, and experience design. She is an award-winning poet and graduated from Stanford in 2013 with a degree in cultural anthropology and a minor in creative writing. Find out more

The Art of Dying by Dream Logic
The Art of Dying premiered in San Francisco in October 2016. This experiential art show invited over two dozen artists and creative technologists from around the world to bring their visions of mortality to life through virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive installations, paintings, sculpture, music and more. The show took place in San Francisco’s mission district as part of OpenIDEO’s Re:Imagine | End of Life week – a citywide conversation through art, experience, and design. Find out more

Final Status – Jojo Gingerhead
If you had a choice, what would you want your final status to be?

There are now over 30 million Facebook profiles of the deceased (Huffington Post, 2012). Some of these profiles are made into memorial pages, some are deactivated by family who have access to the deceased login details, but many remain untouched and still active to friends and the public (depending on privacy settings).

Final Status is a project created by Jojo Gingerhead to highlight the existence of such profiles, the concept that although a person is no longer with us, everything they have ever shared on social networks still exists on the internet up until that very last thing they posted. Their last final status no matter how trivial, positive or negative it may have been, becomes a poignant statement existing indefinitely in a public space for many to see. Find out more

Visitors by Darkfield Radio
VISITORS is a 20 minute immersive audio experience for two people to experience together opposite one another in their living room in their home. It is a reflection on our irrepressible desire to touch and why the dead find so little comfort in the world of the living. We require you to remain 3 metres apart, and while you may yearn to reach across the chasm that separates you, we ask you to be careful who else you invite in. Find out more