Ministry of Awe – Heavens.

“The Heavens” is an ever-evolving, co-created immersive experience situated in a historic bank and centered around a vaulted mural painted by Meg Saligman.

About the Concept

For thousands of years, humanity has told its stories with the stars. In the West, we’re most familiar with those told through constellations like Perseus, Pegasus, and Cassiopeia from Greek mythology, but every culture has its own such stories as well. To us, the stars are a repository of humanity’s values and dreams.

Just as traditional banks have financial instruments to represent value, in “The Heavens,” a set of celestial instruments invites account holders at the Ministry of Awe – a bank of humanness – to tell their own personal stories to the stars, which ultimately become embedded in the mural and are thus held in trust by the Bank for posterity.

The Ministry of Awe is a new six-story art experience occupying a historic bank building in Old City, Philadelphia, originally designed by architect Frank Furness.

On the top floor lies “The Heavens,” our largest programmable space, one which enables “account holders” – and everyone has an account at the Ministry of Awe – to explore the ways we’ve crafted to re-see the mural painted on the vaulted ceiling, all through screenless media: projection, spatial interaction, gesture, speech, touch, custom hardware, and even performance (from Pig Iron Theater Company and more).

And more than that, as visitors interact with the room and contribute their stories and ideas, the room acts like an AI assigned to listen to, collect, and store those contributions, sort them, and represent them for Meg to review. Then over time, Meg will make changes to the mural based on what the AI has “learned.”

A production version of our spatial UX application, Procession, both operates the space, coordinates all the sensors and hardware, and enables us to rapidly reprogram the entire experience (in minutes or even seconds) using modern AI prompting and vibe coding techniques.

Custom Procession clients continuously sense and share gestures, spoken word, and mechanical inputs collected by the instruments. The system then remixes them to render a live, changing projection and soundscape, using various forms of discriminitive and generative artificial intelligence to make sense of it (and all locally in the Bank).

Each of the several embedded experiences (aka mural “sketches”) has a unique ambience, series of visuals, and set of interactions. One sketch may see an angel as a snowy sculpture, and another may see it as the underlying figure of a star constellation.

Our plan is to continue adding more sketches over the next year, fulfilling the “ever-evolving” intent of the Bank.

The sketches are revealed by touching specific ornamentation in the room, the “touch rosettes.” And they give a satisfying, gentle yet room-filling “boom” when touched. (They seem to bring out people’s inner drummers.)

Speaking into the microphone makes a verbal deposit onto the Bank’s arches. Mentioning parts of the mural’s imagery will highlight them.

The “High Priestess” and “High Priest” performers relate the lore of the Bank and give account holders in-world nudges to play with the instruments and explore the mural.

Services:

Concept Design
Interaction and Experience Design
Hardware Design and Fabrication
Software Engineering
Sound Design
Sculpture
Visualization
Interior Layout and Furniture Spec
Fundraising Support

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