Near death experience Down Under, if you´d like to book in

An Australian artist is bringing the experience of dying to life via a virtual reality simulator, showing people what perhaps our final experience in life— death—might be like.

Artist Shaun Gladwell’s show, “Passing Electrical Storms,” at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria conjures the process of dying through “medical technologies,” according to the official description.

Gladwell cites becoming a father as the part of his life that makes living so dear to him. He described the participatory artistic experience as “moving away from yourself and then floating off into the giant universe” in an interview with the Australian this week.

“By simulating death as an experience in its last few minutes, it’s a meditation on the ephemerality of individual life,” Gladwell told the outlet. “For me, it’s not all gloomy but a spectrum of colors and moods.”

Gallery-goers are instructed to lie down on a fake hospital bed wearing VR goggles and are hooked up to heart rate monitors, according to the Daily Star.

Participants are able to leave at any time if it gets too uncomfortable, though, and there are even staff members on hand to “pull you out of it,” according to the outlet.

Marcus, a person that took part in the exhibit describes it this way: “What happens is, you’re lying down, the bed vibrates, you flatline, the doctors come over the top of you, you can see yourself in the goggles, and they try to revive you,” he explained.

“It doesn’t work, then you float up past some, into space, and yeah, it keeps going, but I won’t spoil it all,” Marcus continued in his message to the New York Post.

He told The Post that after going into the virtual reality exhibit, he did ponder the afterlife a lot more.

“It does make you contemplate what happens after death, it also gives you a sense of the scale of both universes within and outside of our bodies,” he wrote. “If anything it makes you marvel at the possibility of life in the first place.”

This is not the first time that Gladwell has created an innovative and provocative exhibit.

His virtual reality experience in 2017 called “Orbital Vanitas” took users into a real-life human skull.

He said that this work has been inspired by philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault and David Chalmers.

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