Buddhist studies. The digital artwork connected to the Leverhulme-funded “
Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities” project is now online. ‘grasp, grasp’ by Sian Fan is a digital artwork which draws on the anonymised life stories of members of two different Buddhist communities, collected by University of Manchester researchers Erica Baffelli and Jane Caple. The work is a web-based experience filled with emotive photography and soundscapes, which traverses multiple pathways. It changes shape, operating in different sequences and moving in different directions, inviting viewers to reflect on the ephemerality of emotions. “It hopes to emulate the feeling of being submerged in all the stories all at once, creating an undefined but reflective wash of emotion and experience. It explores how, in people’s everyday lives, fear exists as an undercurrent, weaving in and out of quotidian experiences. It considers fear’s entanglement with belonging and explores how these states coexist in tension. Without attempting to pin it down, the work hopes to assert the complicated beauty of human experience. It seeks to form a blurry vision of lives lived, that, with your gaze soft and your grip gentle, you can find yourself enveloped within.” ‘grasp, grasp’ is made to be experienced on desktop; it works best on Chrome.
Please take your time in exploring it here.
