Creative Coding · 2022
A computational work reflecting on disappearance, obsolescence and mortality inside digital culture.
Digitdeath is a web memorial for people who died during Hong Kong’s fifth wave of COVID-19. Conceived as a shared digital home, it creates a place for remembrance while asking society to reflect on the public-health crisis and prepare for future emergencies.
Project framework
Process and approach
During the fifth wave, hospitals were overloaded and many patients faced poor conditions without contact with relatives. The project responds to the helplessness visible in contemporary news images by creating a gathering place where those deaths can be acknowledged rather than reduced to statistics.
Government COVID-19 statistics supplied the recorded death count. Layered pixel-art components were combined programmatically to generate more than 10,000 individual profile images, which are arranged into a large cemetery grid.
The website contains a homepage, background information and the cemetery. Its restrained visual language avoids spectacular effects: the mood remains deliberately heavy so visitors can focus on documentation, mourning and reflection.
Moving image
Continue exploring
