How Might we Worship?

The Vegas Sphere and the Power of Immersion

One knows little when walking the Avenue of the Dead.

The expansive road runs roughly 2 kilometers through the ancient site of Teotihuacan that’s nestled just outside of Mexico City. Later settlers believed the Avenue of the Dead was encased by tombs, thus granting its ominous name. But the structures surrounding the forty meter wide road were small houses made of igneous rock, mud and wood. The remnants of a thriving civilization. The first human settlement of Teotihuacan dates back to 600 B.C, and it wasn’t until sometime around 200 or 300 C.E that the city became an expansive urban center reaching roughly 120,000 people, becoming one of the most influential communities of its time.

Looking out onto the cities symmetrical pattern will reveal the true nature of The Avenue of the Dead: a connection to an ancient ceremonial world, carefully outlined through its architectural design. The Avenue stretches from the Citadel in the south to the Great Pyramid of the Sun, and eventually leading to the most western structure and the second largest pyramid in Mesoamerica: The Pyramid of the Moon.

I found myself staring at The Pyramid of the Moon two weeks ago about five feet away from its base which measures approximately 492 feet on each side, and stands roughly 138 feet tall. As the sun slid behind a set of passing clouds I looked up at the East-facing staircase that connected the road to the Pyramid’s highest slope, resting above four stone platforms. Pyramids for ancient civilizations have generally been seen as a means of connecting the earthly realm with the celestial world and serving as a link between humanity and the divine. This was possibly true for the Teotihuacan, since it’s believed the Pyramid of the Moon was a temple built for the goddess of fertility, water and creation.

But the Pyramid would not service this spiritual connection on its own. The steps I was looking at led to a stage where many historians believe human and animal sacrifices happened regularly; where bodies were said to be tied up, decapitated and buried within the pyramid itself, some kicked down the stone slope onto the very gravel I was standing on.

For what purpose? No one completely knows. Teotihuacan’s origins, history, and culture largely remain a mystery. What’s left is a collection of stories and a feeling that their attention to worship ran deep within their culture. That an alliance with the spiritual must be forged at all costs, even if that cost was death.

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The Sphere in Las Vegas runs 366 feet high and 516 wide, offering the largest high resolution screen in the world: 19,000 by 13,500 pixels. It can seat 18,600 people, 10,000 of which have haptic technology built into their seats. Every seat comes equip with high internet access, and a front row view of some of the most intense digital visuals on the planet.

Driving by the sphere one might see bright, psychedelic patterns covering its massive circular dome, or the image of a single eyeball blinking at you as if the Vegas Strip was slowly growing a face. “Sphere view” rooms are already being up-charged at Vegas hotels.

What is offered at the Sphere? Full awareness. A sense of the present that grips you like a vice. The simulation is not an effort to distract, but to pull you closer to a single experience. This sense of full immersion–gifted by twenty-first century technological feats that the ancients could only imagine–now gathers our senses into one collected moment in time. The feeling is magical, nearly spiritual in itself. As columnists Jackson Arn recently wrote about the Sphere:

When art historians write their books on the early twenty-first century, “immersion” will appear on every page. No word better sums up our quixotic hopes for the visual, uniting the lowbrow (video-game headsets, van Gogh warehouses), the highbrow (Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms, James Turrell’s light installations), and the middlebrow (Alfonso Cuarón’s Steadicam jaunts, James Cameron’s 3-D extravaganzas). Immersion bombards and overpowers; it commands the viewer to surrender. At heart, it’s a prayer that we can spend a few moments in a state of pure attention, the sort once rumored to exist in monasteries.

Like prayer, immersion asks us to surrender with our bodies and our mind, trying to slow the ever moving present. We sacrifice the constant drumbeat of our thoughts and offer our attention.

And like prayer, we are naturally attracted to the immersive experience like flies to a light. Some of us more than others. There’s been stories of folks spending too much time gazing into the 500,000 gigabytes of data that are dumped on you every fifty minutes at the Sphere, thereby overdosing on “full awareness.” Luckily, these sphere-goers can stumble their way towards a designated “sensory room,” which are spaces designed to help you detox from too much entertainment. Here you’ll find soft lights and sensory toys. A reminder that the present doesn’t have to be so deep and visceral, but quiet, tactile and understood.

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One must feed the mountain.

The Paradise of Tlaloc”, found on the walls of an apartment in the Tepantitla Complex in Teotihuacan has been argued by historians to symbolize the civilization’s worldview. The image depicts people going about their daily lives, picking flowers and playing games. Next to this scene is a great mountain showing people falling from its crest into its inner chambers, eventually flowing out to the ground with other animals and depictions of vitality. The color red fills the interior of the mountain, and people of all colors (which historians believe represents various members of caste systems) are being carried through this process by a river of red and blue (seen below).

The notion of feeding the gods was commonplace in Mesoamerica, but what makes the scenes of Tepantitla unusual is that they portray everyday people, warriors and priests making the offering. What historians are sure of is that this image depicts some impression of the Teotihuacan world order: replace the mountain with Teotihuacan’s man-made mountains, like the Pyramid of the Moon for example, and one see’s a mural teaching us the need for human sacrifice to keep the waters of vitality flowing and the Teotihuacano community thriving.

Standing near the Pyramid of the Moon, I felt only confusion. Its symmetrical nature seemed complexing, even with the stories describing it’s rationale. To feel committed to a spiritual world order as a society with such confidence felt distant, and the sensory input at the site kept reminding me of my time and place in the world. Tourists could be heard in the background speaking in both English and Spanish; phones were constantly out taking photos of its mammoth structure. There was a sense that I had missed something, a collective feeling once discovered here that our time could never capture.

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What does the Sphere capture? In terms of architecture, not much, according the former architecture critic for the Los Angels Times:

“if you turn all the projections off, as just an inert object …the sphere doesn’t seem to represent a new way of thinking about architecture.”

What might it symbolize? One clue into its meaning might be with its visual projections. A Jelly fish or Jack-o-lantern might pop up on its expansive dome as you drive by every now and then, but mostly it projects ads. Writer, Maura Judkis hits it on the nose:

Sphere is an ad for itself: either its U2 residency or Aronofsky’s film. It is, really, the most Vegas thing of all: a sign.

Viewers are provided a representation of itself in various forms. The object settles into its preoccupation with the signifier rather than the signified; its fragmented definition offered like the bits of pixels dotting its massive display.

And so centuries from now, future civilizations might walk up to a blinking totem to one of our most prized, 21st century beliefs blazing in the streets of Vegas: truth is untethered and gathered in performance through representation.

Like our ancient friends, recognizing this collective truth gives rise to an existential anxiety which forces us to come up with a coping mechanism. Their’s was a structure that reached for the stars and called on the gods. Ours pulls us further into the material, making us face our secular moment head on in one audacious, tidal wave of immersion.

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By the time the Aztecs journeyed to the Pyramid of the Moon around the 14th century, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for a long time. The Aztecs began naming the art and symbolic structures, creating their own version of what the city might have meant to its original people. Whatever we know about the city now, we know through the Aztec’s interpretation of things.

When I left Teotihuacan I thought about our own symbols that would be left over to posterity, and the stories we leave behind. I thought about the ways we pay attention, and how that might get misconstrued over time. Might the Sphere find a new purpose under the gaze of some future civilization?

Maybe some future people with a wild, new spiritual paradigm discover the sphere and project their celestial worldview onto its structure. Or maybe it will be found by some new-age secularists, laughing at our pedestrian version of immersion when they turn the lights on inside the great dome.

Or maybe by then there will be an understanding that the secular and the spiritual aren’t so distant when it comes to some of our intentions, and that we are constantly worshipping whether we know it or not.