death

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint. 

c ya laterrr  garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. 

The blog Ihpil: Láhppon mánáid bestejeaddji was presented as the genuine diary of a 19-year-old, lesbian Sámi girl studying in Tromsø, using the pseudonym Ihpil. The blog starts on her first day as a student in August 2007, and lasts until she drowns in December of that year. Later the blog was published as a print book. In 2010, a journalist discovered that nobody drowned in Tromsø harbour that day, and Sigbjørn Skåden revealed himself to be the author, claiming that he had always intended to do so at some point (see NRK 4 Feb 2011). 

"Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay" is a prose-poem in the form of a blog that explores the theme of modern violence. The work is a "playful" response to the Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1954). The journal entries detail ludicrously gruesome and elaborate plans to murder the helpless birds: from poison pellets to cyanide darts to water cannons.

The blog fiction was first published online in 2007. In 2015, it was exhibited at ISEA International. 

"On October 1st 2015, ten people were shot and killed at UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE in Roseburg, Oregon. The University of Washington where I work is located near the slaughter, enough for the medias to consider the event as local and send journalists on the site. It was definitely close enough for me to think: "But what if...".

Nick Wing wrote in The Huffington Post that the Umpqua Shooting was the 45th school shooting this year as well as the 142nd taking place since the slaughter at SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.

Several of these shootings were considered as mass killing, wich means, according to the FBI, a shooting involving at least four victims or more exculing the perpetrator. Many people died in our schools.

The Umpqua shooting made me react to that. What could I do to pay respect to the victims of Rosenburg in Oregon? What could I do to pay respect to the those across the whole country? I thought that by pronouncing all these names, we could remember the victims, confirm their existence and in the end, keep them from being forgotten."

(Source: bleuOrange : http://revuebleuorange.org/)

This is a text-based re-enactment of Boromir's death scene from The Fellowship of the Ring. The simulation uses Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition rules.

(Source: Author's description)

Clarah Averbuck is a writer residing in Sao Paulo, who became notorious for her thinly-veiledly autobiographical fiction and who began her career writing on the Internet. In the real world, she is alive; in the story, she is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Her death itself is completely irrelevant, but the “mystery of her death” connects different storylines.

(source: José Carlos Silvestre, Experiments in Literary Cartography, 2010)

The End: Death in Seven Colours is a non-linear Internet artwork made in the interactive authoring environment Korsakow. Seven deaths (corresponding to seven colours of the rainbow) are examined through the prism of popular culture and film in a vast, encyclopedic mash-up. The work presents an “exploded view” diagram of our culture’s relationship to death and narrative closure. Like a chose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theory, The End weaves together a paranoid meta-text organized around themes of the unknown, concealment, secrecy, and the shifting boundary between animal, man and computer in the post-human era. The deaths of Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Walter Benjamin, and Marcel Duchamp become the touchstones for many impractical segues and short circuits peppered with recurring motifs such as 4 a.m., His Master’s Voice, Snow White,The Rainbow, Chess, The Man Behind the Curtain, and an array of famous surrealist artworks that find new meaning in their entanglements with these stories.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

"Two Roads Diverged" is a story of family loss and its aftermath. Using Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken" as its metaphorical model, this interactive narrative offers brief glimpses into the paths three children take after the accidental death of their parents. The narrative also offers a view--through archetypal imagery and remote voices--of the darker side of the family's tragic past.

(Source: Author's Description)

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)