21 Grams

Responsive installation

I returned to exploring the failures of quantification with the interactive installation 21 grams.  The title is based on the purported weight of the human soul, putatively identified by Doctor Duncan Macdougal of Massachusetts in 1907,
who constructed a special bed arranged on very delicately balanced scales and weighed six patience in the end stages of terminal illness before,
during, and after death. 
Needless to say his “scientific” results were absurd, particularly as the exact time of death was difficult to determine,
and he freely admitted that his experiments would need to be repeated many times before
“the matter could be proven beyond any possibility of error”
In 21 grams, a virtual particle cloud condenses and disperses in a mirroring of the movement of viewers through physical space into a series of 21 texts that reference loss, absence and memory.