Between the Sacred and the Profane in the S. João d'Arga's Festivities: A Digital Art Installation

This paper describes the concept, creative process and development decisions regarding an interactive art installation that materializes a point of view on the conflict between the notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in a particular Portuguese religious festival. The initiative, besides constituting an experiment on the usage of a physical pendulum as control method, aimed to combine three main domains: digital art (in particular generative art), documentary value and game-like challenge. Each user undertakes a personal experience as interaction occurs with a poetic symbolic simulation of the real pilgrimage. As the user intervenes indirectly in the main struggle, the profane and sacred pilgrims, in the shape of digital autonomous agents, uncover a generated art piece that is both a product of the artist vision and the inevitable result of the users conscious and unconscious decisions. Between the Sacred and the Profane in the S. João d’Arga’s Festivities: A Digital Art Installation