CONCEPT: WALKING THROUGH LIVES
The University Museum of Bergen's curved screen room, currently displaying the deep-sea exhibition, offers a unique architectural canvas for experiencing human life trajectories derived from HUNT Study data. This proposal reimagines the space as a temporal corridor where fictional lives unfold in real-time across the panoramic screens, allowing visitors to walk alongside individuals as they age from birth to death.
Core Experience
Visitors enter the curved screen room to find themselves immersed in a continuous procession of lives. On the far left screens (at the room entrance), babies appear — their bodies rendered with subtle movement, their health data hovering above them like biographical halos. As each figure slowly moves rightward across the panoramic screens at walking pace, they age in real-time: crawling becomes toddling, running as children, adolescence, adulthood (partners may appear, children may manifest), middle age, and finally elderhood.
At the far right of the screen (room exit), the elderly figures fade and disappear — a quiet, dignified conclusion. The data above each figure evolves continuously, reflecting their changing health markers, socioeconomic status, life events, and psychological states as derived from HUNT patterns. Visitors can walk alongside these figures, following a single life from birth to death, or stand still and watch the procession of diverse lives pass by.
Spatial Life Timeline
0-2 years
3-12 years
13-19 years
20-45 years
46-65 years
66+ years
← LEFT SCREEN (Entrance/Birth) ————— Curved Screen Room Journey ————— RIGHT SCREEN (Exit/Death) →
Diversity of Lives
Gender & Identity: The procession includes men, women, and non-binary individuals, reflecting contemporary understanding of gender diversity while remaining faithful to HUNT demographic distributions.
Life Span Variance: Not all figures reach old age. Some disappear earlier — a child who dies young, an adult lost to illness or accident. These tragic trajectories honor the reality of mortality captured in longitudinal health data.
Socioeconomic Spectrum: Workers and intellectuals, wealthy and poor, educated and not. Body language, clothing, data overlays all shift to reflect class position and economic trajectory as individuals age.
Psychological States: Some figures radiate vitality and happiness; others carry visible weight of depression, anxiety, chronic pain. Posture, gait, facial expressions subtly communicate mental health states drawn from HUNT mental health indicators.
Data Visualization & Sonic Ambience
Floating Data: Above each figure, key health markers appear as minimalist text: BMI, blood pressure, mental health indicators, employment status, family structure. These update as the figure ages, creating a living biography that visitors can read as they walk alongside.
Occasional Speech: Through localized directional speakers aligned with each screen section, figures occasionally speak to nearby visitors. A child might express wonder; a middle-aged worker might reflect on career fatigue; an elderly person might share wisdom or regret. These narrative fragments are generated by LLMs grounded in the specific data constellation of that individual at that life stage.
Ambient Soundscape: A subtle sonic environment fills the room — not intrusive, but present. Layered breathing rhythms (faster for children, slower for elderly), occasional environmental sounds (footsteps, distant conversations, birds for outdoor moments), and a low-frequency harmonic bed that shifts in response to the collective emotional tone of figures currently visible. The soundscape must be carefully calibrated to enhance immersion without overwhelming the quiet, contemplative atmosphere.
IMPLEMENTATION PHASES
Phase 1: Prototype Video (Proposed 2026)
Format: Pre-rendered high-resolution video installation for temporary display (3-6 months)
Content: 20-30 pre-generated life trajectories carefully crafted to demonstrate the range of HUNT-derived narratives. Each life follows authentic data patterns but is fully anonymized and synthetic.
Duration: 45-60 minute loop, seamlessly repeating. Visitors can enter at any point and experience continuous narrative flow.
Focus: Proving the concept, refining visual language, testing visitor engagement, perfecting sonic ambience. This phase allows for iteration based on visitor feedback before committing to complex real-time generation.
Phase 2: Real-Time Generative System (Future)
Technology: AI-driven real-time character generation using HUNT statistical models. No two visits would be identical — each session generates new lives on-the-fly.
Interactivity: Potential for visitor interaction — kiosks where guests can select birth cohorts, socioeconomic conditions, or health factors to influence which types of lives appear.
Adaptive Dialogue: LLM-generated speech responds to visitor presence detected via sensors, creating personalized narrative moments.
Permanence: Designed for long-term installation (5+ years) with periodic updates to incorporate new HUNT data releases and algorithmic improvements.
Why This Space, This Concept?
The curved screen room at the University Museum of Bergen is uniquely suited to this installation because it transforms data into embodied experience. Unlike traditional data visualization that asks viewers to intellectually parse charts and graphs, "Walking Through Lives" invites visceral, empathetic engagement.
The spatial metaphor — birth at entrance, death at exit, aging as horizontal movement — mirrors the fundamental structure of human existence. Visitors don't just observe data; they walk through time alongside these lives, experiencing the slow accumulation of years, the gradual changes in health and circumstance that longitudinal studies capture but rarely make emotionally tangible.
By repurposing a space designed to evoke the mystery of the deep sea (another realm of scientific data made experiential), this installation creates an equally profound encounter with the "unknown territory" of other human lives — made knowable through decades of rigorous health research, yet rendered mysterious and moving through narrative synthesis.
Educational & Research Value
Public Understanding of Longitudinal Research: Most people have no experiential understanding of what "40 years of health data tracking 229,000 people" actually means. This installation makes that abstraction concrete and humanly meaningful.
Health Literacy: By seeing how health markers evolve across lifespans — BMI creeping up in middle age, blood pressure rising, mental health fluctuating with life events — visitors gain intuitive understanding of health trajectories that could inform their own choices.
Empathy Across Difference: Encountering lives vastly different from one's own — a rural worker struggling with depression, a wealthy urbanite developing diabetes, a young person dying unexpectedly — builds cross-demographic empathy grounded in data-validated realities rather than stereotypes.
Academic Research Potential: The installation itself becomes a research site. How do visitors engage with data-driven narrative? Does this form of presentation increase science communication effectiveness? Visitor studies could inform future health communication strategies.
Conclusion: From Data to Dignity
"Walking Through Lives" proposes a radical reimagining of health data as cultural artifact. By transforming HUNT's rigorous longitudinal research into an immersive narrative experience, this installation honors both scientific precision and human dignity. It demonstrates that data need not be cold or abstract — when treated with care, it can illuminate the profound commonality and diversity of human existence, making visible the patterns that shape our lives while preserving the irreducible mystery of each individual journey from birth to death.