Can Technology Create a Sense of the Sacred?
Ahead of Mariko Mori’s Tokyo retrospective, a look at the luminous space where art, technology and spiritual inquiry meet.
Can a glowing sculpture or an immersive digital environment invite the same kind of attention we bring to a sacred space? Mariko Mori’s work gives that question a vivid setting. Across photography, performance and installation, she has made technology part of an ongoing exploration of consciousness, belief and our relationship with the natural world.
Her forthcoming retrospective, Mariko Mori: All That Shines, opens at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum on October 31, 2026, and runs through March 28, 2027. Organized in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, it brings together approximately forty works from more than three decades.
Mori’s early photographs placed her in futuristic costumes amid everyday surroundings. As Chelsea College of Arts’ interview with the artist explains, works including Subway and Play with Me, both from 1994, used cosplay imagery to examine consumer culture and women’s roles in Japanese society. Her practice subsequently opened toward spiritual traditions and questions of existence.
In Wave UFO, created between 1999 and 2002, participants enter a sculptural pod where a brainwave interface translates activity into projected imagery. The museum connects the installation to Mori’s idea of “Oneness,” an understanding of humanity as interconnected. Entry inside the pod will be limited during the exhibition, a practical detail worth checking before planning a visit.
The work also asks us to consider what we expect a machine to reveal. Brainwave feedback supplies a technical process. The suggestion of spiritual unity belongs to the artwork’s interpretation. A shared projection can give viewers a way to imagine connection without establishing a scientific explanation for consciousness or a universal spiritual experience.
Another work, Tom Na H-iu (2006), uses data from Japan’s Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory to illuminate a sculptural form. Invisible physical phenomena become a changing visual presence. Read culturally, that gesture invites a question about scale: how does an individual life relate to events extending far beyond ordinary perception?
Mori’s 2025 exhibition Radiance at Sean Kelly in New York approached similar concerns through stone-inspired sculptures and a white, silk-veiled shrine installation. The gallery describes dichroic surfaces that change with light and a viewer’s position. Looking becomes a bodily activity, shaped by where we stand and how we move.
In the Chelsea interview, Mori explains that an idea determines her medium, and that computer animation can help her approach experiences that are difficult to express in language. She also describes her exploration of Shinto, Buddhist and prehistoric traditions as a personal journey. That specificity matters: these works carry the artist’s interpretations of those traditions.
A useful way into the retrospective is to notice what its materials ask of our attention. Do we slow down? Look again? Become more aware of other people sharing the space? Technology can help stage those encounters. The sense of the sacred, if it arises, remains an experience each viewer brings their own language and beliefs to understand.
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