Theatrical Imagination and Belief

I am delighted that my research proposal The Remediation of the Gods (Phase 2): Theatrical Imagination and Belief has been funded by the NSTC (National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan). The research will unfold between August 2026 and July 2028 and further develops my work on religion in contemporary art, imagination, neuroscience, digital media and AI.

ABSTRACT
This continuation project, The Remediation of the Gods (Phase 2): Theatrical Imagination and Belief, examines contemporary artworks that actively stage situations in which gods and higher beings “act”, rather than merely representing religious tropes. Building on Phase 1, The Remediation of the Gods: Live Art in the Age of Animation, it brings theatre and performance studies into direct dialogue with religious studies, philosophy of imagination, and debates on AI and posthumanism. Following Anna Ichino, it asks how such works mobilise “religious imaginings”: patterns of response that treat the gods as present, guiding behaviour without requiring propositional belief.

Through comparative case studies that extend work begun on Choy Ka Fai, Lee Mingwei and Hsu Chia-Wei to include Kornkarn Rungsawang’s Mali Bucha and the Dazaifu Tenmangu Art Program, especially Ryan Gander’s New New Day, the project analyses how live art remediates ritual within the “Age of Animation”. It brings Dorothea von Hantelmann’s account of museum “rituals of separation” into conversation with Bruno Latour’s beings of metamorphosis [MET], fiction [FIC] and religion [REL] to clarify what kinds of beings are made present when gods appear on stage or in the gallery, and how audiences respond to them.

A focused research visit to Aalto University’s MAGICS infrastructure in Finland situates this humanities-led analysis in active conversation with current research in neuroscience, psychology and human–computer interaction, testing how concepts of imagination, attention and motivation might reframe performance-based encounters with gods and spirits.

The overall aim is to develop a robust theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the theatrical overlap of art, religion and technology, and to demonstrate its wider utility: showing how these works offer models for thinking about human relations with non-human agents more broadly, including ecological entities and AI-driven “para-human” interfaces. Anticipated outputs include journal articles, a monograph-in-progress, and pedagogical materials for interdisciplinary teaching and public engagement.

Keywords:
live art | religion and contemporary art | theatrical imagination | interdisciplinary performance studies | neuroscience and imagination | digital media and AI