Proposal

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12)

In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, faith is challenged in a separation between those who fear God and thus live with seeping guilt, and those who fear God and live with a complete trust, like Abraham, willing to kill his own son, having faith that God intends something beyond reason. David Pulliam, in his Masters Thesis on the work defines these aspects as, “Religiousness A is when the individual senses great guilt in the presence of God and has a strong sense of God’s immanence. [...] Faith in Religiousness B is transcendent, taking its start from the paradox of Jesus Christ (the God-man) being both God and man, both infinite and finite. One who come to faith goes through a ‘paradigm shift,’ shifting out of a ‘human understanding.’” The whole point, it seems, of the Christian organization of the world is to purify oneself of their guilt to act as a vehicle for the Lord, not thinking about their actions as anything other than God’s will. Art, then, can aid this journey if we follow Andrei Tarkovsky’s ideas of art putting the human soul through a “trial” that prepares it for death. By creating a separation through storytelling, the mind is able to glean a different outlook on its sins, and thus atone for them. Thus the artist must be pure, in some sense, in their own faith in order to impart that trial onto others, giving them an immense spiritual undertaking. This is, essentially, the plot of Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev, the chief work of inspiration for my capstone, which follows the titular artist finding their true faith to be able to create paintings for a cathedral.

My capstone seeks a similar goal: to present a trial to the audience that will push them through, in some way, a spiritual journey. It will feature a cathedral in Virtual Reality (VR), which will be partially flooded and existing in a dreamlike ominous reality, clearly outside time and space. When they interact with elements of the cathedral, such as Stations of the Cross, the altar, or a hymnal, videos will appear at various sizes and distances which represent memories of the character they embody. These memories range from arguments with significant others to internal dialogs of self-doubt, to simply struggling to wake up in the morning or cleaning up after an accident of some kind. They are domestic situations that should feel grounded in reality, but exaggerated in a way that makes them clearly imagined. By the end, the audience will need to come to grips with who they are playing as, and possibly themselves, and find a way out. This could be through self-drowning, giving themselves the stigmata with a stake that appears once the memories have been viewed, or simply pulling the headset off.

To achieve this, I will need to learn basic game development in Unity. I am choosing Unity because it is beginner-friendly, and I have already learned in the 3D Modeling class how to import assets. I have already begun watching YouTube tutorials, and thankfully C# is coming pretty easily from my background in P5.js and Processing, so acquiring the skills I need should come easily. I also will need to expand my 3D Modeling knowledge a bit to include rigging and animating in a more robust way than previous projects, though the animation burden should be relatively light considering the first person perspective. Because I am intending on expanding on this work as my BFA capstone. This quarter I aim to both construct the cathedral, and record short audio versions of the videos to come to the same conclusion but in less time. I plan on using an iterative process, implementing elements one at a time and play testing often to figure out what works both in VR mechanically and in the scripts of the dialogs.