The gate of Your present is an interactive installation that recreates an initiation ceremony. Various elements of the site-specific installation draw on shamanism, animism and natural treasures to create an eclectic ‘transcendent collage’. The inscription „IT DEPENDS ON YOU” at the top of the gate puts the onus on the viewer to step into the water and cross over, or remain an outside observer.
The work is both generative and interactive, as the viewer steps into the staircase of water elements and crosses the gate, and the sound of a Tibetan singing bowl is heard through a hidden motion sensor. The sound of the Tibetan singing bowl is associated in Zen Buddhism with the ideal of pure consciousness, it is believed that if one can follow this sound, one can for a moment escape the plane of historicity and arrive at the moment of the ‘present’, that is, outside of historical time, in a sacred and cosmic time. A time where duality and the perception of a divergent world disappear.
The paradox of the work lies in the automatism of the initiation: the voice is automatically sounded with the same monotony for everyone. The quality of the sphericity of the change can even be questioned. At this point, we realise that the acquisition of such experiences is not only a function of the outside world, but is also one’s own spiritual task. This is the transcendence of the work, since everything depends on us.
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