On June 12, 2016, an active shooter walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida at 2:02am with a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17 pistol and killed 49 LGBTQ+ individuals, mostly of Latinx descent, that were at the gay club celebrating “Latin Night” . The shooter fired over 200 rounds in the first five minutes, killing many on the dance floor, and then stood off with the police over the following three hours as patrons were barricaded in the back bathroom.

As a living queer cyber memorial honoring the 49 lives lost, our Pulse Memorial project reimagines remembrance as radical inclusion and global solidarity, providing a platform for storytelling, reflection, and empowerment. Designed as an online, participatory sound installation, the virtual memorial can currently only be fully experienced when eight or more people listen together in the same setting. The project consists of a 24/7 web broadcast that distributes eight individual real-time audio channels to participants who visit https://pulse.memorial with their mobile devices. When participants listen together in one location, they create a dynamic, moving multichannel soundscape.

This project is a collaboration between Brook Vann, August Black, and Betsey Biggs. We are currently in the process of adapting the concept for 49 channels over 49 minutes. The new adaptation draws inspiration from the existing graffiti-like memorial panels that are currently positioned at the Pulse site. These panels, layered with handwritten notes left by the community, accumulate and fade over time, capturing the shifting yet enduring nature of remembrance. Similarly, as we solicit and collect new audio contributions, incoming audio will gradually replace older tracks, creating a constantly evolving broadcasted memorial.