Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Death awareness can serve as an awakening experience and act as a powerful spark for significant life changes. This inquiry is not about dying and terminal illnesses but about transforming our relationship with our mortality. Instead of talking about death only when someone is terminally ill or close to it, this inquiry attempts to refocus discussions about our mortality, inviting us to transform the fear of it. The inquiry explores our denial of death while engaging an idea of creative contemplation about it through Art-Based Research (ABR)—culminating in digital collages (DC) and an animated video (AV). Those visual forms support an overall long-term attempt to break through common resistance and compel those interested in considering new ways of seeing death and acting as a mode of interpretation of an extensive literature review. The final AV will be broadcast during May and Jun 2024 to the audience recruited through the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), USA, and the participants will have an opportunity to partake in the quantitative survey and explore the possibility of transforming the relationship with death.