Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The presentation that follows offers a groundbreaking exploration at the intersection of experimental art and existential inquiry. It delves into a unique creative writing exercise where participants from diverse age demographics are invited to articulate their visions of an ideal day of death. These narratives serve as the raw material for an avant-garde experiment in collective storytelling, weaving together disparate perceptions to craft a tapestry of contemplation on mortality, transcendence, and the human condition.

Embedded within the broader context of experimental art, this endeavor forms a crucial component of the doctoral thesis entitled "The Receptions of Death in the Art of the Digital Era: An Interactive Screenplay and the Creation of Digital Stories." Grounded in theoretical frameworks encompassing autoethnography, the hero's journey, and the boundless realms of creative writing, this project exemplifies the innovative spirit of experimental art, pushing the boundaries of narrative convention and inviting participants to embark on a profound exploration of life's most profound mysteries.

How Do These Connect? Initially, the complexity of human perceptions regarding the notion of the ideal day of death is incredibly intriguing. Participants represent a spectrum of demographic, cultural, and personal experiences. Through interviews and narrative submissions, the project captures individual aspirations, emotions, and references to the concept of an ideal day of death. Narratively, the multi plot multi character storytelling is the parallel narration and development of plots with different main characters and conflicts in the same work and in an equivalent way in terms of emphasis, intensity, and time. The purpose of this work lies precisely in this: in creating multiple human experiences and perceptions of mortality, reconciling individual beliefs and values in a collective form of storytelling. By placing and connecting these personal images, the screenplay aims to provoke internal reflection, empathy, and a deeper understanding of the human condition facing the inevitable. Autoethnography lies in the fact that the author – myself – takes these stories, adds to them or subtracts from them, and in this way, they become hers. The "key" is how smoothly and harmoniously the plots run in parallel, intersect, and conclude. Actions may be unified through three dramatic elements: either with a clear unified problem or meaning behind the actions of all main characters. In multi plot films, different characters and plots work simultaneously for the development of the same theme. In this case, the theme is the idealization of death, acceptance. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: what gives meaning to life also gives meaning to death.

Autoethnography allows each researcher the freedom to choose the material for analysis, and this freedom enhances our ability to empathize with people, to understand research in other ways, subconsciously, without detracting from its value or academic substance.

Denzin and Lincoln argue that the conception of objective truth is unattainable, but we can know it through its representations. Therefore, the richness of autoethnography lies in the realities emerging from the interaction between the self and experiences. There are two types of autoethnography: analytic and submissive. This particular work falls into the submissive category, as it is a more "artistic" attempt aimed at evoking feelings in the readers.