Crossings/An Interactive Installation

My global art/science team’s interactive installation investigates relative perspectives of sacred texts, motivated by believing world conflicts are fueled by intolerant religious misunderstandings. Our interactive game allows people to explore relative similarities. It is not a religious quest, but an artwork for people to understand cultural philosophies are not very different. It premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki Greece, 2009. An abstracted Multi-faith Cathedral rotates on a wall as people enter a virtual religious space. A database of keyword frequency tagged texts is incorporated in our software. Participants are asked to select words (topics) to explore, with an infrared wand, and move, place them along horizontal lines to weight topics. Simultaneously, Kaipainen’s multi-perspective 3D search engine displays texts revealing relative importance the sc<x>riptures provide from vertically searching (bottom to top) word placements. They save their selections, later retrieving from a website to learn from which religions their color-coded texts originated. The installation is variable in size, and very easy to install.