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.

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.