Terminal Lucidity

*Contains strobe effects 

The lingering afterimages of bright lights on our retinas after we move into darkness, the sonic echoes of a passing car’s thundering bass, the hallucinations that emerge just before sleep—our bodies preserve the residues of lived experience in strange, unexpected ways. More acutely still, some beings experience a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, or a "death rally”: an unexpected, deeply unreliable resurgence of vitality at the threshold of death.

In Terminal Lucidity, artist P. Staff casts these elusive phenomena back into our bodies, in collaboration with lighting designer Josephine Wang, composer Lukas Frank, animator Adam Sinclair, and programmer Joseph Stewart. An algorithmically randomized constellation of moving image, light, and sound ensures that no two encounters unfold in the same way. The single-channel video work extends out from the screen, shimmering behind our eyelids and drumming in our ears.

Originally conceived for the galleries and elliptical staircase of the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto—a Venetian care home founded in 1527 for the sick and dying—Terminal Lucidity at EMPAC is its first presentation in the United States. It inhales and exhales through eerily biochemical fields of saturated color, punctuated by rhythmic cycles of light and darkness. Likewise suspended between ascent and descent, sensory overload and uneasy calm, the soundtrack shifts abruptly between orchestral fragments, field recordings, muffled room tones, and distant reverberations. Terminal Lucidity leaves us with an unsettling question: if our bodies remember even after the known world disappears, can we relinquish control?