"What if every death had a price?". Death has a social value closely linked to the country in which it occurs. This leads western countries to place a higher value on their deaths than on those in developing countries. Micromort highlights this disparity, a new currency that converts the social value into economic value, setting a price for each death depending on where it occurs.
This price is calculated using Hades 2.0, a specially designed algorithm that takes into account the number of deaths from non-natural causes in a given country, the GDP per capita and the total population of that country.
In this way, the tragic events that characterize the histories of states are no longer humanitarian catastrophes but real economic crises, and for this reason alone they are difficult to forget.
As a currency, Micromort is subject to annual fluctuations that are archived, recorded and visualised for inclusion in the stock exchange of death, an interactive video installation called Stock Exchange Monolith.
Consisting of 16 screens, a touchscreen monitor and 8 meters in length of LED panels, it displays more than 21,000 data points on deaths and disasters in every country in the world from 2000 to 2017. This takes the user on a space-time
journey through the history of global catastrophes, triggering in the viewer a reflection on the value placed on each death.
To create an interaction that was memorable and that touched users deeply, a user-friendly interaction was designed and implemented. The idea was to create a data visualisation system that would allow each user to travel into the world
of Micromort, understanding its true speculative nature. Starting with The WebGL Globe created by the Experiments with Google team, I learned to program in Three.js to make the product perfect for our purpose.
At The Lost Graduation Show in 2021, Micromort attracted more than 2000 people to interact with it's interactive experience. The monitor has been touched more than 4500 time, and the data collected make us understand how the concept behind Micromort is strong and increasingly actual.
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