Digital Temple

Project Link

www.digitaltemple.art

Overview

Nestled into the western foothills of the Taihang range in China’s Shanxi province, Kaihua Monastery (c.1073/1092–96) was once a large complex of structures. However, today only one building still stands: its main Buddha hall, The Treasure Hall of the Great Hero [Mahāvīra] (in Chinese, Daxiongbaodian). With an interior rich in pictorial iconographies, this Buddha Hall’s visual program transformed it into a virtual theater by embedding both temporal and spatial transformations within its representations. By unpacking the artistic and religious underpinnings of the temple’s visual program, CAMLab stages a virtual experience of the temple’s transformative process, through which an array of semiotic and sensorial media reconstruct—and facilitate—the transcendence of embodiment.