The Heart of the Wise

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning." — Ecclesiastes 7:4

Requiary begins with the acknowledgment of a paradox: grief is both universal and deeply personal. Everyone experiences loss. Yet we're often left without adequate spaces to honor that experience—especially spaces that don't demand we move through mourning on someone else's timeline, that don't require religious frameworks, that welcome the full complexity of how grief actually feels.

Requiary creates that space. Drawing on the visual language of medieval mourning—ritual, religious iconography, gothic aesthetics—the project engages these traditions through a contemporary lens. We're not recreating historical practices. Instead, we're asking what secular sacred space looks like now. What rituals serve us when we can't rely on inherited belief systems? How do we honor grief's weight while remaining accessible to people from all backgrounds?

The Experience

Enter a darkened sanctuary. A generative soundscape envelops the space—composed of ambient textures, layered field recordings, and tonal presence. This evolving sound environment doesn't dictate mood. It holds space. It breathes. It provides acoustic architecture for contemplation, offering support without demanding specific emotional responses.

At the center of the experience, you're invited to participate. Offer a simple statement of what you're mourning. Your contribution becomes part of a living, data-driven visualization and soundscape. The system doesn't just archive your words—it identifies resonances with others' expressions, revealing unexpected connections between individual griefs. Your loss finds company in strangers' words. Patterns emerge that honor both the specificity of each mourning and the ways grief connects us.

You won't be able to easily identify your specific message in the visualization. That anonymity is intentional. Your grief joins others. Individual losses reveal patterns. What felt singular discovers it's part of something larger.

Move at your own pace. Read what calls to you. Contribute if it feels right. Silence is welcomed here.

The Approach

The aesthetic decisions throughout—the darkness, the layered sound, the particle-based visualization—all serve the same purpose: creating contemporary sacred space that honors grief without prescribing how to experience it. This isn't art therapy. It's not a grief support group. It's a space that takes mourning seriously and creates room for visitors to be present with loss—theirs and others'.

Technology becomes transparent. The particles, the clustering algorithm, the spring physics, the semantic embeddings—none of these should be noticed. Visitors should feel held, witnessed, and connected, without ever thinking about how the system works. When technology succeeds, it disappears. What remains is the encounter with grief.

The Name

A reliquary is a container for sacred remains—a vessel that holds what was lost but remains precious. Requiary adapts this concept for collective grief: a digital vessel holding anonymous expressions of loss, each message a relic of someone's mourning, preserved and witnessed alongside others.

The name also echoes requiem—a mass for the dead, a musical form of memorial. Requiary is both container and ceremony, archive and ritual.