Altar to Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun

Now that the story that I wanted to tell has come out, I would like to refine its message, continuing to work on the project in both its physical format and on this website.

The Altar of Our Lady of the Shining Silver Sun is meant to “break the ice” and hopefully create a forum in which people can talk about incidents of losing touch with reality and/or psychotic breaks without fear of judgment. To that end, I would like to make www.shiningsilversun.com a website where people can tell their own stories. Making it a collective storytelling website would turn the site into a location on the web similar to a real altar, a place where community gathers and which governs and grows itself. A few possibilities I have been exploring have been letting people create their own retablos, either posting just the stories themselves in text format or uploading images of retablos that tell their stories about visions and breaks with reality. Not everyone in the village feels like they have the desire or ability to paint or draw his or her retablo. In this case, one could choose whether he or she would like their story illustrated by the town painter (in this case, me).

As far as the actual physical shrine, work will continue as the animations, its form, and the interaction are refined. What was too subtle will be expanded and new movements will be explored. The use of real video footage mixed into the footage will be explored (for example, footage of water, as opposed to a simulation of water from After Effects). Interaction will be tested, to continue to try and find subtle but rewarding ways for a viewer to discover rich content. To this end, activation of the animation with sensors that detect presence as well as sensors that detect touch (as the altar is very textural) might be worth looking into.

I would also like to concentrate and spend a bit more time with the objects on the shelf of the altar, choosing more objects that relate directly with the stories depicted in the animation and hopefully involving objects that people can touch and feel. I am considering trying expanding the theme of the everyday being “transfused” by making these objects animate as well. Motors and sensors can make these objects react or change in subtle but surprising ways. Developing an altar is making a representation of an ongoing relationship. Little objects and tributes of gratitude can always be added and the shrine will be constantly changing form.

As this is an altar meant for the community, I’d like to get everyone else involved, adding spaces on the shrine that encourage people to add objects and content of their own. Just as a panel of retablos in a church tells many individual stories, if you pull away and look at all of the stories together, it also tells the story of a larger community. In much the same way, this altar can start to be the story of not only one person’s experience but the story of the many people that have had an experience of losing touch with reality. Overall the most important thing is not to explain the “unexplained,” but to share that experience with others.