worlds of grief

Worlds of Grief is an exploration of grief's various strange, inexplicable stages of mourning. In this piece, I used the image of planets falling from the sky and orbiting around one's home to depict the strange reality that is dealing with grief: one where daily life is intruded by these giant, formidable emotions that keep you up at night.

Download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11SL_AgdJjf7i-YLuhI2zAhAPJuquGK2q?usp=sha...

Process and Photos here: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/alternative-reality-fall-2022/students/wee-paul...

SPOILERS AHEAD

This piece focuses on three stages in particular: anger, bargaining, and depression, which characterize the most intense and anguished parts of grieving. Each "world" that the user enters is an attempt to understand each emotion and simulate its atmosphere through the virtual reality experience. 

First, the anger of grief is, as stereotypically depicted, hot and raging, but it is also often held within our bodies and turned against ourselves. I depicted this personal, ironic, and contradictory anger with bodies shouting endlessly against each other but simultaneously rooted in place, unable to make a difference. 

Second, bargaining is depicted through a city torn apart into buildings that now orbit giant rotating scales. A chief characteristic of bargaining in grief is the constant "if" -- "If we had only done things differently, this would not have happened." These empty, balanced scales represent the truth: that there is no more measure for these things that have already left us. We can only move forward lest we get trapped in the cycle of obsessing over what we could have done, like the buildings suspended in orbit.

Lastly, depression is set in a lonely lagoon where a face shields itself against a rock face and covers its eyes. Its tears have pooled into a lake. It's set in a tightly sealed box, where many of our negative emotions are relegated when they are too much to handle: compartmentalized where other people cannot see or perceive them. However, a crack in the corner of the box sends the user into a free fall through fragments of that face and hands, showing the necessary release and catharsis of these dark emotions. 

The user falls, thus, into a big purple planet to represent acceptance, and a return to the same world, but now with a deeper understanding and a greater comfort and familiarity with the worlds of grief.