Traces of Prayer

Traces of Prayer

Work created in 2026/1/1

'Trajectory of Prayer' transforms surveillance technology into a ritual device, manifesting digital animism. The object detection algorithm functions as a Shinto priest naming all things, while standing before the camera becomes an act of offering at a sacred threshold. The detected body is fixed as an ancestral spirit in sepia tones, from which Gagaku×Techno music autonomously grows—creating an acoustic space where spiritual time (eternity) and mechanical time (repetition) are layered.
This autonomous growth system, marked by console logs reading '🌿 The music has evolved,' implements the Japanese natural religion's view of life: all things possess spirituality and undergo transformation. Gagaku, historically performed in Shinto rituals to invoke deities, is algorithmically fused with techno, suggesting that machine vision itself can possess divinity.
By re-reading surveillance as prayer, the work inherits the fundamental flexibility of Japanese animism—the worldview that recognizes sacredness in all things, refusing nothing. It proposes a new form of contemporary prayer: entrusting one's body to algorithms, accepting the transition from present to past, thereby generating music that continues to resonate in the future. This is not technological critique but the discovery of spirituality within technology itself.