Suicide Counter

And Audio-Visual piece, this project was displayed on a projector in a small dark room. The displayed number represents the number of individuals who have commit suicide by a certain point in time. Using a simple phone interface, users can move between years, watching the number increment slowly when looking at years in the past, and quickly when looking at years in the future.

Gathering suicide rates from previous years, I fit a curve to the data (exponential curve) to predict suicide rates into the future. By moving between years, the viewer gets a sense of how often suicides occur and how rapidly the rate is increasing.

Each time the counter increments, a found recording from a real suicide is played - yes, this is a real recording of a suicide. These recordings are found in various places online and can be extremely impactful and upsetting. Some of these sources originally can from video recordings, but only the audio is used (recordings taken from all over the world and are in various languages).

The result is the viewer sitting in a dark room listening to people's final words as they commit suicide, watching the steadily increasing rate of suicides in the world. As they move into the future, the audio recordings begin to overlap as the time between suicides shrinks.

Trigger Warning

Sensitive Audio Content of suicides.