The Art of Dying Young is a film installation and new media tour that examines the lives, local histories and place-making initiatives of Brooklyn neighborhoods, told through the human lens of four young men who have been memorialized through murals. Each mural will be the end point of an immersive on site tour of the neighborhood curated by the life of the deceased using landmarks integral to their lives. Each landmark will be points of content distribution: 360 video, spatial audio, original film content, narration and/ or text overlays giving an experience of the site and/or a brief history when viewed on mobile devices using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications. Through an in-depth interview and research process with family, friends, mural artists, mural sponsors and community members, the artist creates an emotive fictional film that will depict a dream that the deceased may have had while they were alive. The films will be narrated from the voice and perspective of the deceased beginning with the words "I once had a dream that…" The films are intended to be accessed at the site of the original death memorial mural, distributed using augmented reality technology and viewed on smart devices. There will be a companion website to this project that will contain ancillary video of interviews, other death murals, statistics and stories of people currently living in these communities. The project was selected for the 2016 Sundance New Frontier Lab and is also under support from Creative Capital.
