MODERN GURU AND THE PATH TO ARTIFICIAL HAPPINESS
Interactive Art Experience
Eslite Spectrum, New Taipei City, Taiwan
This immersive new media art installation uses the intersection of art and technology to explore modern paths to happiness through unique interactions with characters along a mystical journey of discovery.
Visitors are asked to commit to the path – a tight and winding trail with subtle points of connection along the way – a glowing landscape of oversized, whimsical mountains that chant incantations and blink innocently from digital eyes.
Pilgrims also encounter a ten-metre tall forest dancer twirling in the middle of the path. She is a symbol of creative freedom in the modern world. She twirls happily in the middle of the installation as an example of the type of free-form happiness that’s possible through artistic pursuits and being true to the soul. She wears a dress of light that emphasises her form in space and celebrates the delight she feels dancing alone and uninhibited in the forest.
Visitors gradually progress through this journey of ritual, realisation, and revelation to the final part of the work to reach one of the two all-seeing gods.
Modern Guru is a translucent ovoid with four huge digital eyes, floating above a ceremonial ring of LEDs. From his mouth flows a ream of absurdist messages, and in a statement about the true nature of lived experience, a new message is delivered when visitors take a photo of Modern Guru – a missive produced only for those who seek to photograph life rather than live the moment.
Having communed with the Guru, visitors then weave their way back through this warped and strange world full of illusions and delusions, perceptions and deceptions, all the while bathing in luminescent light; embracing big, gentle forms; and following their own path up the pink tongue staircase to meet the one who oversees the whole fantastic dominion, the Sun God.
Location: Eslite Spectrum Xindian Store, Taiwan
