This Device Allows you to Simulate an Out-of-Body Experience
Technology and metaphysics converge in the project Faith Condition.
In recent decades, technology has become the undeniable protagonist of contemporary reality, obliging us to imagine a model of communion between this and other fundamental aspects of our daily life: social, professional, emotional and even spiritual.
In this techno-spiritual context, art once again presents itself as the optimum catalyst to allow two apparently opposing aspects of humanity to harmoniously converge, in the project Faith Condition by Lukas Franciszkiewicz.
Franciszkiewicz designed a device that allows the simulation of an out-of-body experience, that door to astral journeys that various mystical traditions speak of. To implement the exercise of the ‘technologicalization’ of consciousness, Franciszkiewicz suggests an alteration of self-perception with the aim of fusing ‘real’ and virtual bodies.
The participant ‘psychonaut’ achieves a three-dimensional vision of themselves via a stereoscopic camera placed on their head, which allows them to view their own body in third person. To complement the experience, the user moves about followed by the device to a place where people pray. At that moment, while the person prays and simultaneously watches themselves from outside, the exercise reaches its climax.
“Fascinated by the technological reproduction of the religious phenomenon known as out-of-body experience, I developed a series of experiments based on perception using a device with video-glasses and cameras. The initial aim was the manipulation of human self-perception by blurring the boundaries between the real and a virtual body. Derived from these experiments I created new scenarios for an out-of-body sensation,” the artist says.
It must be said that the majority of people are unaware of the function of the technology that accompanies us every day. As such, for Franciszkiewicz those tools have become the receptors of an asset that was once almost exclusively taken care of by religion: faith.
And it is here that the artist shares his final question with us: How does implicit trust in technological products change our behavior and moral?
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