dying is not enough

dying is not enough is the most recent work by diewiththemostlikes (dwtml), and his third project with glitch Gallery.

The series is a meditation on the transience of all living things, and on the ways in which we as humans strive to make sense of these mortal conditions and fail to do so. The reality of death, which has been pervasive throughout dwtml’s work, is treated here with fewer filters of irony than in previous series. Frailty and fallibility appear here as the human condition: the fall already taken, long before any of us arrived to take it.

The seventy-five animations loosely recall the flickering of a glitch aesthetic. They show scenes of desolation, figures being put to death, and people made to appear death-like in the course of meaningless work or senseless consumption. Some scenes are deeply mournful; others are almost celebratory in their embrace of demise.

The human figure appears as creaturely: aware of its end, and yet given over to the flesh, to its appetites and its forgettings. There is a Christian lineage to this: the human in her fallen state, death as the boundary against which life and meaning take shape. And yet these works arrive at no single message; they offer no consolations.

Memento mori here points to nothing beyond itself. There is only the remembrance of what we are, returned to the present, and the beauty of our imperfection.

If death is inevitable, why is dying ”not enough”? The paradox at the heart of the work emerges from the way humans have to face death while being unable, in any real sense, to do so. Death is a certainty for the human being, whether it arrives violently or as a slow decay. We are the only creatures aware of our finitude and obliged to live with that awareness. And yet we are equally compelled to bury it in the routines of work and consumption that define our days.