Rituals

Rituals is an installation with Improvised performances which presents two Intertwined simulated human sacrifice rituals that point to different results. This work reflects the choice of good or evil. 

仪式是一个带有即兴表演的装置作品，展示了两个交织在一起的模拟人类牺牲的仪式，指向不同的结果。这件作品反映了善与恶的选择。

/Concept and Background Research

The project starts out with my personal interest in mysticism and religious culture. The human sacrifice which is a cruel ritual appeared in almost every culture. The low productivity of the old primitive societies made the survival of human tribes very fragile. If there were more people, there would not be enough food; if there were fewer people, they would not be able to cope with wars and disasters, and the population had to be precisely controlled. I personally believe that the condition for a primitive tribe to develop into an ancient civilisation is to be able to break out of this productivity limit and not worry about basic survival all day long, in order to be able to pursue a higher level of life (even if only for the ruling class). The longest, largest and bloodiest human sacrifices in human history took place in South America, which was also the least developed civilisation in terms of ancient agriculture, with no iron and dense rainforests making land reclamation difficult, no large livestock and no invention of the wheel making farming and transport inefficient, and a lack of high-calorie crops. Religious brainwashing followed by human sacrifice was the least costly option to solve the population problem. In contrast, the Egyptian civilisation, with similar levels of religious fervour, soon stopped pleasing the gods with their precious souls, thanks to the rich Nile Delta.


Similarly, even developed civilisations that had eliminated the tradition of living sacrifice continued to legitimise methods of population control in other forms in isolated and impoverished areas on the periphery. In remote mountain villages in some parts of Asia, there has been a tradition of throwing old people who are too old to work into the mountains and leaving them to fend for themselves. Therefore, these inhumane actions, in fact, are the choice of humans themselves. The nature of profit-seeking makes them choose a way to get rid of trouble which they think is the guide from the gods. However, on the contrary, it's the way to hell.

/Technical Implementationion

First of all, I used two laptops to do the projection and sensor connection work separately due to the far location of different devices. So, I used an OSC transmission here. On the sensor connection side, to realize the two steps of the ritual, I applied two different sensors. The first part is decisive for the entire experience. In this part, you will need to decide whether to sacrifice the offerings. The sensor installed on the doll is a waterproofed water sensor covered with hot melt adhesive. It was connected with Arduino to the openFrameworks to tell if the doll is thrown into the water. The other one is a Kinect. Inspired by the project that used it to detect depth and trigger sound and visual changes, I applied it to detect the blow on the plastic film. Blow is a common action in many rituals which means the reveal of the scene or truth. So, when the Kinect detects blobs, the signal will be sent to the projection part. Moreover, the sound is completed in the part. I used cosine and saw waves with the arguments of the distance of the blobs and the volume of water. On the side of the projection, I draw the image here. I draw a bunch of spheres and give them the texture of an eye. And also, I import a model of myself. When the sensor part sends the message of 1 for both sensors on, and 0 for only Kinect on, this part will display the scene of the hell and the image of yourself.


/Reference

1. ‘Human Sacrifice’, Wikipedia, 2022 [accessed 17 May 2022]
2. dan buzzo, Make Generative Creepy 3D Eyeball Clouds - Tutorial: OpenFrameworks SuperBasics E21, 2021 [accessed 17 May 2022]
3. Imamura, Shôhei, Narayama Bushikô (Toei Company, 1983)
4. Beck, Renee, and Sydney Barbara Metrick, The Art of Ritual (Apocryphile Press, 2009)