End of Life
To date, the End of Life project has included ethnographic fieldwork with five people experiencing various stages of the end of life. The fieldwork began in the spring of 2012 and is ongoing with three people, two having died. The 42-minute assembly of video images and sound prepared for the GIDEST seminar is a work-in-progress for an anticipated feature-length film. Four of the five people are introduced in this initial segment. The video is best viewed in one continuous session with careful attention to the sound.
John Bruce is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons. His teaching and professional practice involve empathy, ethnography, and creative intervention. He serves as senior strategist at Forward Mapworks, a wholesystems consultancy, providing insight and design for ventures and movements operating in complex ecosystems. John's work in a variety of media formats explores possibilities for modes of immersive experience, engagement, and exchange. He studied painting and installation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and sustainable systems at Pinchot in Seattle.
End of Life is a non-fiction moving image project focused on people experiencing various stages of the end of life. During a research period of more than three years, John’s fieldwork, in collaboration with filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik, involved five different people within varying contexts in the U.S. The durational nature of the fieldwork conducted and the media works created from these experiences attempts to address the distances created between the living and the dying.