exhibition on in London - Life Before Death - which shows emotive pairs of huge black-and-white images of terminally ill people in the moments before and just after their deaths.

These, of course, are all stills. For kinetic death, one can view the 'look away now' news footage of Third World suffering, most famously of the Ethiopian famine. And those morbid enough can today trawl the internet for snuff films, camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein's hanging, or recordings of jihadists beheading Westerners. In the flesh, Iranian police summon up crowds with loudspeaker announcements to cheer as criminals are hanged from cranes. Theirs is not the only country which still carries out public executions.

Part of what distinguishes Schneider's artistic project from these spectacles is his intention to explore death as a natural process. He

is covering similar ground to documentary maker Paul Watson, who charted how Alzheimer's sufferer Malcolm Pointon struggled with the disease for 11 years. Publicity for Watson's acclaimed film Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, purported to show Pointon's final moments, surrounded by his family as he faded from consciousness. Actually though, Pointon died off camera three days later, and Watson was forced to fight a legal case against ITV defending his role in the confusion.

The questions Schneider's plan raises range from moral ones - is it right, who will want to see it? - to mundane ones: will the gallery charge, who would profit? And if, as Schneider says, "the dying person would determine everything in advance... everything will be done in consultation with the relatives", then isn't he merely commissioning the work, not creating it?