PEACE BE WITH YOU

Peace Be With You is an interactive simulation originally presented in the Spring Undergraduate Exhibition at School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleries. The work centers on the Catholic ritual of Eucharistic Adoration, in which a consecrated host—representing the body of Christ—is placed within a monstrance and circulated among parishioners. As the object moves through space, chants reverberate and participants are expected to kneel in sustained devotion, a duration that can extend from minutes to hours.

The simulation amplifies this encounter, rendering a spectrum of responses to the presence of the host: ecstasy, grief, panic, agitation. Some figures collapse into reverence, while others resist, cry, or destabilize under its proximity. These reactions foreground the psychological intensity of ritualized belief and its capacity to organize collective behavior.

Situating the ritual within a broader historical framework, the work reflects on the imposition of Catholicism during Spanish colonization as both religious doctrine and cultural infrastructure—one that facilitated erasure, occupation, and the internalization of otherness within the Filipino psyche. Authority is concentrated in both the object and its carrier; the monstrance becomes a conduit through which divinity, judgment, and control are enacted.

Within the simulation, the monstrance operates as the central agent. A radiating field of light activates varying intensities of devotion in surrounding subjects, sustaining them in continuous states of praise until disrupted. The user assumes control of this system, occupying a governing position and becoming complicit in the mechanisms of influence, obedience, and indoctrination the work interrogates.

The environment is constructed from over sixty photographs of the altar at which the artist was baptized in Metro Manila, Philippines. These images were processed into a 3D model using Autodesk ReCap, grounding the simulation in a site-specific reconstruction that merges personal history with systemic critique.