memento mori - a lost storytelling tradition

For millennia, death has been a common theme of storytelling. We have long imagined ways we might live forever (fountain of youth, elixir of life, afterlife, legacies) but mortality awareness has also been an important story that humans told one another. Artistically, this became known as memento mori. In the Renaissance, many visual artists would feature skulls, hourglasses and flowers (alongside other items related to death or decay) as a way of teaching about mortality. Vanitas and Holbein’s Ambassador’s are two particularly notable examples. Death has always been a common theme in poetic and dramatic writing too - be that coping with loss or coming to terms with one’s own mortality. 

However, in contemporary digital society, we have somewhat lost touch of our mortality awareness. Technological advancements facilitate the rise of the immortality myth – we can live on forever in online representation or extend our lifespan using the various technological tools around us claiming to optimise our biological rhythms. 

My project aims to use technology to try and reclaim the memento mori myth. How can we use technology to teach about mortality and ephemerality? It thinks about how we use these technologies to amplify the things that make us human, and thus mortal. Thus I have chosen to focus on making evident/visible biological features we cannot see: our breath and our heartbeats (two constants when we are alive. In both cases, their cessation marks our death).