As I’ve sought the Lord about new spiritual insights for sharing the Gospel over the years, one concept has consistently been forefront as an example of the principles: virtual reality photography. Not as something perfect to be copied, but something different to help me seek. Prayerfully working with it, both online and as a witnessing tool, has shown how new approaches can open doors that have been closed to conventional witnessing.
Studying apologetics has also shown some new ways that this way of grabbing people’s attention can be used to point to the Gospel. Bringing these insights together, I hope to rebuild the experimental efforts that I used over the last decade into a next step.
It starts with the idea that we need to get people’s attention, and does so with a particular type of photography. We need to point to the spiritual without necessarily being explicit about it at the beginning. This is done through the use of metaphor, symbolism, and so on, and the goal is to enhance the link to the spiritual through writing, although the initial content is intended to engage people with concepts that they already find interesting – their “unknown gods” – and point them to deeper consideration.
Like Paul’s efforts in the Athenian marketplace, this hopefully leads them to want more. That deeper content, more directly spiritual and leading to the cross, would be presented in a different site called “Kelvin’s Clouds”.
There are two reasons for keeping Kelvin’s Clouds separate. First, due to the post-Christian nature of our society, I think we need to be careful about introducing spiritual concepts, especially Christian, right away. A separate site allows Whole Reality to engage people with abstract ideas without immediately triggering any anti-religious sentiments.
Second, there may be other ways to bring people to the content being developed for Kelvin’s Clouds, and it may be best to not confuse those paths with what to some is a rather obscure photographic interest.
At any rate this is the initial plan. Whole Reality is described below.
Comments are more than welcome.
Whole Reality is an exploration of the art and craft of spherical photography* and its use to convey ideas and emotion. This is common with some types of standard photography such as fine art, abstract, and so on, but is much less common with spherical photos.
Instead, spherical photos are normally used to provide viewers with a “you are there” experience by allowing them to look around a scene in any direction. Examples include Google StreetView, showing real estate or hotel rooms, and making immersive games. These applications are useful and fun, but still leave plenty of room for new artistic expressions.
As a result, there’s an opportunity for new thinking to develop this capability.
To start with, some existing photography genres use techniques that can be adapted to spherical photography. So a key opportunity is to learn techniques that can be adapted to spheres – the way images are composed to express ideas, how colors and lighting are used to evoke emotion, how symbolism can be used to communicate ideas, and so on. Exploring these ideas in spherical photography involves first understanding and practicing standard photography.
There may also be possibilities that work only with spherical photography. For example, making prints that are not flat, finding ways to experience spheres other than just panning around, and making standard photo prints come alive with virtual content. In fact, the connection between standard and spherical photography is another reason why regular photography is part of this work.
The results may still be beautiful, but also interactive, surprising, eye-opening, and fun. They can encourage us to consider more than just a fixed view, illustrating the value of looking around and paying more attention to the world around us.
While it is valuable to learn to see more, the ultimate goal is to learn to understand more. The vision-expanding nature of spherical photography is also useful for exploring things like the nature of consciousness and self, reality and transcendence, beauty and perception, and connections (especially human). Many of these are ideas that stretch the limits of rational thought and therefore benefit from being explored through art.
Much of this seems to be uncharted territory, so to a large extent it represents a journey rather than a well-known destination. Nevertheless, I hope there are plenty of interesting and useful things to share.
* Also called “virtual reality photography”, “VR photography”, “360 photography”, “Photo Spheres”, and more.
Exploring Antioch 