As I've lived my life, I've seen many people close to me die. As time went on and more people passed away before my eyes I began to wrestle more and more with the concept of death itself and what it's like to slip into the end. While I was coming to grips with these thoughts racing through my head, I had begun to notice a pattern in the way that people slowly faded away. In each of these cases, I summarized the way in which people's consciousness breaks down into five stages. Once you are on the path of no return, the first stage of death is the increased rate of sleep throughout the day as well as the unwillingness to eat. Even though you are fairly conscious and able to speak when you are awake, your higher frequency of sleep and malnutrition comfortably begins to lull you towards the end. the second stage is slipping in and out of consciousness while you are awake. Now that you are gradually excepting your journey towards the end your consciousness begins to breakdown as your willingness to fight back decreases. The third stage is the inability to use your body anymore and keep your eye's open as well as further degradation of your consciousness. Now you have reached the point where your body is almost no longer able to fight back against the fading and you are now too tired to even open your eyes and you can barely tell when you are conscious or not. Stage four is the final approach of the complete fading. I don't exactly know myself what happens at this stage, but I'm guessing in these final moments is where you see the entirety of your life one last time as the reasoning behind you being on this earth sets in as the final comfort you get before you pass on. The last stage is the death itself and whatever you see or don't see that comes with it. In my work, I wanted to depict these stages by using the picture itself to represent your consciousness and the glitching effecting itself to represent the degradation of the mind during each of the stages. I suppose you could say this piece is either like a coping mechanism for the deaths in my life or maybe a way I express the way I imagine what death feels like for everyone. I'm not sure of the answer myself so I'll let you be the interpreter for now.
