I have made a pietà but I am not religious. I love art though, especially art from the renaissance and baroque eras. Which often addresses religious stories. The feelings I experience in front of such art are deeply spiritual. I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between the beautiful and the divine.

Anyway, iconography and narratives of Christianity are central to the culture I exist in. To witness them makes me feel rooted, embraced by a civilization that has been around for a while. Even atheists in the West uphold many Christian values. It’s part of who we are. And Christianity hooks into our life on earth just like other religions do. As the planet revolves around the sun and the days get longer in the northern hemisphere, Christianity celebrates the return of the light during the Easter period when Christ is crucified and resurrects. Celestial events impact all of us. Somehow, it moves me to express them through Christian symbols.

The biggest challenge for me as a contemporary artist was to create a traditional scene without adding a modern twist. I wanted this piece to be sincere and respectful. I wanted it to become part of tradition, rather than breaking with it. That turned out to be much harder for me than making a joke about conventional themes, or contrast them with pop culture aesthetics, or adding critical notes. I had to go against my nature as a modern person. It took quite a bit of prototyping and resisting temptation to arrive at the present result. But I’m glad I did it. To submit myself to the unquestioning creation of beauty has been a wonderful exercise in humility.

The contrast is of course obvious: I’m making conventional art in a highly non-conventional medium driven by hypercommercial technology. But I like computers. They offer us a way to create and experience art that fascinates me. I have made many websites and videogames in the past. Virtual Reality is my current focus. At first the headset seemed like just another screen. But VR is different. It gives me the opportunity to create things that feel like realities, rather than pictures to look at. And that’s exactly where it connects to the old art that I like. Before artists got good at depicting reality, and long before photographic technologies, the objects they created felt precisely like worlds to me, like pieces of reality, not pictures of it.

Counterintuitively it seems to take a certain amount of abstraction to makes things feel real, rather than simply look real. In VR too, a scene tends to feel more magical when it does not look photographically realistic. Maybe because it’s amazing that these objects that cannot exist nevertheless feel real to us. Most of the aesthetic choices in Compassie were inspired by paintings, not by photographs. Even if computer technology continues to increase its capacity to render things photo-realistically, it is in essence a technology to create with rather than reproduce. And as such, from an artistic point of view, computers are in fact more closely related to brushes and chisels than to cameras.

The simulation of an environment that surrounds us is what attracts me to the digital. It's theatrical in the way that the baroque is. And I like that sort of playfulness. During creation I found myself thinking, when confronted with a design problem, "How would a baroque artist solve this?" Interactivity, to me, is not central to this medium, but only a way to help the user understand that what they are witnessing is a living world, and not just a picture of one. In Compassie interaction is reduced to the minimum (you can raise up your arms a bit) because anything else would disrupt the atmosphere too much. But it's enough. And even now the piece requires some discipline from the spectator. They are responsible for their own experience. Precisely as in any other art form. But this responsibility, this choice, this decision about how to act, deepens the experience. Much like stillness in a temple or a museum will make a bigger impact than running around doing summersaults. A work of art is like a musical instrument: it can produce beautiful sounds but only when played well.

Compassie delights me more than anything I’ve made before. Because it gives me an opportunity to be sad. There’s so many corpses in my life. Dearly departed. Several of which I mourn for in secret. Hiding behind the VR headset. Where no-one can see you cry. It feels so luxurious to be able to be sad! Just sad, just to be filled with this enormous feeling of failure and desperation, to let it expand and take over your world, with nobody telling you to cheer up or look at the bright side or to relax or fix yourself. Just sitting there in the dark, in the absolute, endless darkness of empty cyberspace.

For me this is about loss. An opportunity to mourn for the things that have disappeared. Or are about to disappear. On a personal level. But also on a global level. I believe we are living through a time of transition. Transition away from an untenable and disagreeable state, true, but nevertheless unsettling. What will need to be sacrificed for our salvation? How will our new lives be in the new world? Or, in the other scenario in which we don't choose to change: how will we cope with all the things that will disappear? How can we mourn the enormous loss that we are in the process of experiencing?

After the Coronavirus pandemic, I hope to present Compassie as a physical installation. But for now, we will make do with the solitary experience of a VR program at home. But maybe that’s more fitting anyway.