Timur Si-Qin. Within Spiritual Experiences in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Timur Si-Qin’s work elaborates links between virtual reality and spirituality in a peculiar way. In a context of cultural transformation that sees digital religions as expressions of faith, with virtual reality as their recent development, his works are placed as a bright political intervention aimed at promoting ethical change. Timur Si-Qin’s project New Peace is a new protocol for a post-secular and inclusive faith in the real that fosters a spiritual relationship with matter. New Peace employs branding and multiple mediums, including virtual reality, as cognitive access tools that benefit from human propensity for spiritual thinking. The article focuses on his work A New Protocol VR (2018), an immersive experience in which the user falls into a vast desert landscape. Here the ethical contents of New Peace are conveyed as he/she connects to Pray to Scale, a spring of meditation on vastness, one of the four sources of spiritual emotion conceived by the artist. In investigating the relationship between virtual reality and spirituality, a debate emerges showing different visions of the medium as a vehicle for spiritual experiences. These visions are the background to the artist’s peculiar artistic-philosophical perspectives in which he aims at overcoming a vision of the digital as immaterial-disembodied and presents a unifying subject-object, mind-world, and spirit-matter outlook placed in the emergencies of present time.