New Deity新神

New Deity新神 is an interactive installation featuring a technological altar for the supreme deity of the digital age. As religious communities shift online, the traditional notion of gods blurs, and the sacredness and rituals essential to believers' faith wane. Consequently, congregations treat machines as all-powerful gods, while the blending of religious images in cyberspace leads to a chaotic integration of various faiths.
The new deity represents a fusion of transitioning gods from diverse core religions, cults, and pagan beliefs, displayed on a cluster of screens. Audience members engage by praying at the altar and receiving a personalized blessing script from the new deity.
Generated by machine learning techniques such as StyleGAN and GPT, the content effectively captures and combines the essence of different religious symbols, images, and texts. New Deity新神 offers a thought-provoking exploration of technology's impact on the nature of belief, inviting viewers to contemplate the evolving landscape of faith in our connected world.

「New Deity新神」是一个互动装置，其形式是为新时代的最高神灵设立的一个技术祭坛。当宗教团体开始将其活动转移到互联网上时，神的概念似乎变得模糊了。神圣和仪式感，这个构建信徒信仰体系的最关键的方面，逐渐消失。不同的教派向机器祈祷，把它当作万能的神。同时，网络空间中的文化挪用使不同宗教的形象混乱地融合在一起。新神的化身哺育了几十个交杂、融合、不断变换的旧神，这些图像由来自各种核心宗教、邪教和异教的神的图像数据集生成并展示在原始的屏幕群中。每个观众都可以通过向祭坛祈祷，从新的神灵那里得到他们的祝福文字。所有的内容都是由机器学习应用StyleGAN和GPT等模型生成的。

/Concept and Background Research

The project started from the research of using Chinese amulets to express oriental religion and traditional culture in the western context. The image of the orient is objectified and marginalised with the consolidation of the leadership of the system of the west. The elements of oriental culture and religion are frequently misused in mainstream European and American film and television productions. For instance, the characters and architectural forms from Taoism and Buddhism are used together, being considered Japanese culture in the notion of cyberpunk. The oriental audiovisual symbols are often merely props to construct the plot and space. Various religious elements have been cut, collaged and grafted together. And the concept of cyberpunk is always tangled with them, which indicates the connectivity between technology and religion. We used to believe that the sacred is eroded in a modern, predominantly industrial, individualistic society. However, industry and technology are instead shaping the sanctity of alternative religions, which is unpredictable and hard to control. The form of a mixture of religious cultures inspired me, making me raise the scope to a very general notion of religion.


In 2020, during the pandemic, Pope Francis held a special Urbi et Orbi blessing in Italy, with no one physically participating. St.Peter square was empty, and the believers were at home going through this strange moment with either television or internet streaming. On Chinese social media, there are always a group of people praying under the post of the image of the Buddha or Guanyin, asking for blessing and wishes. At the same time, live stream chanting and praying are taking place on Youtube and Tiktok. Cyberspace is also carrying all kinds of religious activities right now. The Muslims in France launched an online gathering on Twitter #Nous Sommes Unis in 2015 in order to speak up for their community. With the development of technology such as mobile devices and the internet, it has become an excellent place to proselytise and maintain the vitality of religion in the young generation. However, the absence of physical space causes the dissolution of materiality and physical experience. One of the most important aspects of religion which constructs the belief system of the believer, the sense of ritual and sacred, fades away. Different congregations pray to the machine treating it as the almighty god applicable to all religions. So I critically set the machine as the new deity and built an altar for it. The idea of shape is from the temple. The Eighteen Rohan is standing on the hierarchy steps of the altar for Buddha in many temple halls. Applying this kind of visual form, I created the altar with all the screens displaying intermingling, combing old gods, those who were the supreme ones consecrated by people. The cable tubes connected to the screens are like vessels of the new deity nurturing the old ones. The black tubes are sometimes a symbol of mastering in the context of cyborg. And I create a new way of praying for the god of machines. The action of taking photos everywhere in the era of social media has become a situation being criticised as well. People seem to be slaved by the pictures and try hard to create the image of themselves with the posts on social media. And for some religions, it is not respectful to take photos of the statue. So, it’s ironic to pray to the deity in this way. The amulet part is reserved and made as a blessing from the new deity. I used yellow thermal printing paper to make the amulet as traditional as the ones used in the real world.


/Technical Implementationion

I’ve spent two months in advance researching the screens because they are an essential part of this project. I tried hard to use Arduino to control multiple screens to display videos with different screen models and found it can hardly realise. So, I eventually chose the plan of using an Arduino board for each matched screen to display images and several mobile phone screens to display videos. I generated all those images and videos by machine learning models, styleGAN and GPT-3 on the platforms like runwayML and openAI. I collected the datasets for about a thousand images of gods from different religions, including cults and paganisms and fed them to the styleGAN model. And they are pre-generated into films and dynamic images and stored in the TF cards. The blessing texts are generated by GPT-3 with a very nonsense tone, which is content directly grabbed from the internet. The thermal printer is controlled by openFramworks with a link to the Arduino light sensor. There is a QR code on the script which leads to a image displays a ‘god’ and the blessing. The height of the sensor is considered to create a respectful look-up angle of the audience participating in the interaction. The interaction set uses a camera flash to take a photo, and the printer starts to print a script of blessing. I chose the structure's material carefully, using metal and transparent acrylic to create a futuristic and industrial sense. The parts can reflect all the light in the darkroom including the blinking of Arduino boards.


/Reference

1. Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Penguin UK, 2016)
2. Evolvi, Giulia, ‘Religion and the Internet: Digital Religion, (Hyper)Mediated Spaces, and Materiality’, Zeitschrift Für Religion, Gesellschaft Und Politik, 6.1 (2022), 9–25
3. ::‘::Sy5z3n: ::4 ’: [accessed 8 September 2022]
4. Code for thermal printer: https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/ofxThermalPrinter.git
5. ‘OpenAI API’ [accessed 8 September 2022]
6. The Future / The Human League — The Golden Hour of the Future (Remastered Edition) | Black Melody Limited [accessed 8 September 2022]
7. QR Code Generator: https://editor.p5js.org/bobby226/sketches/ovWJ_gJOo