Devotion
CultureHub Performance
Residency & Premiere, October 18, 2024
The first five Joyful mysteries of the Rosary, premiered as a durational desktop performance at CultureHub, New York.
October 18, 2024
Durational Performance, 6 hours
As a durational performance, Himala consisted of 5 computers – projected, on participants' phones, overlaying projections, on devices scattered around the room. I built custom controllers & scripts to progress through and alter the flow of the work: a prayer, a meditation. The first five mysteries of the rosary were premiered at CultureHub in October 18, 2024.
Through Marian apparitions, technologies of containment, maternity, passivity, delusion, and ritual-building are hallucinated. Supernatural, she is only a saint; our virginal software submits to us. Within these infrastructural intimacies, the reward for devotion is delusion. Any sufficiently advanced girl is indistinguishable from a god. This is why they do not let us ascend.
Twenty net art scenes—one for each mystery of the Rosary—meditate on Mary's perspective as container, intercessor, network, and apparition, translating the rosary's collective computation into a browser-based, prayer-dense, looping desktop ritual.
Treading through the infrastructural intimacies, containers & computers, and the domesticity of the divine – CultureHub Resident Artist Chia Amisola builds upon technological and Filipino Catholic mythologies in a new series of work that presents an ambient and ritualistic look towards our containers and the faiths they enable.
The history of Catholic ritual is one of ritual, communality, and poetry – now, Himala draws from Filipino practices such as the Pasyon to recenter containers. Can I become an apparition myself?
Through Marian apparitions, technologies of containment, maternity, passivity, delusion, and ritual-building are hallucinated. Supernatural, she is only a saint; our virginal software submits to us. Within these infrastructural intimacies, the reward for devotion is delusion. Any sufficiently advanced girl is indistinguishable from a god. This is why they do not let us ascend.
Himala was developed with the support of the the CultureHub Residency.
Photos by Ji Hoon Kim courtesy of CultureHub.