Themes such as death, love, the future, have always been catalyzers of human creativity. Some theories claim that awareness of death leads people to defend their culture of reference, so that a part of the self can continue to live on, on a symbolic level, even after an individual’s passing. This is to some extent a similar process that art wants to enact and trigger in the viewer.

The paradigm of mortality salience is known to induce a cognitive state of awareness of one’s own mortality, which leads to an improvement in the view of those who share our opinions and cultural positions, and also changes the creative abilities of those who experience it.
In this project, we asked whether the aesthetic experience is able to induce a state of self-awareness similar to that induced by mortality salience and can similarly change the creative capacities of those who experience it. To this end, we conducted an experiment as part of the Numero Cromatico exhibition Tre scenari sulla percezione del tempo, the results of which are currently being analysed.