"Let’s pray!" is a virtual experience based on the exploration of spaces inspired by the stories of sects and radical religious groups. The shape of the created locations refers both to authentic historical events (such as, for example, terrorist attacks or mass suicides) and to the symbolism of individual cults and pop culture phenomena arising around them.
The project is a collection of my ideas about them, it is an arrangement of objects of an unnatural scale, which I stretch in virtual reality, forming sketchy installations. In these stories, I try to find common elements that make up a network of connections throughout the project. Their observation is to provoke the participant's reflection on the repeatability of the shape of phenomena emerging from the chaos of the universe.
For example, Nike shoes, in which members of the Heaven's Gate sect commit mass suicide, were designed and manufactured in an American town in Oregon, where the Rajneesh sect decides to settle. I also find similar analogies and borrowings between the sect of the Supreme Truth, the Aokigahara suicide forest, the World Sanctuary of Peace and Reunification, the Kids on Fire School of Ministry summer camp, the Temple of the People, the Defenders of Life and the Knights of Christ. Some symbols placed in space serve as portals transporting the observer between locations, linking individual fragments of the narrative into a cause-and-effect sequence.
All seven boards are embedded in the Unreal Engine, the whole is composed of objects, photos and found footage sounds, which through its collage character is to emphasize the schematic nature of these configurations.
Portals that allow you to move between levels are hidden in objects that the participant can track, guided by the intensifying effect of heat. Playing the hot-cold game, the observer teleports between areas on the story axis, without an ending, in an eternal loop of extracorporeal journey.
The viewer begins the exploration by leaving the levitating body and for the rest of the way drifts in virtual spaces devoid of gravity, having the ability to penetrate objects, hover above the ground and unlimited range of action. Traffic is stopped and the reality becomes a museum. It is meant to emphasize this reproduction of a specific moment in history and our passivity towards it.
The title of the work is ambiguous.