divine time #1 – ali eslami

Divine Time: A Video Series on Sacred Tech and Alternative Temporalities explores how languages of cinema and video games articulate the spiritual, mystical, and enlightened, tracing the intersections of techno-corporeal realism and the metaphysics of digital experience. The series foregrounds how artists’ technologically engaged practices generate emergent modes of encounter — where desire, sacred tech, and the languages of cinema, video games, and AI converge to reconfigure the boundaries of digital culture and embodied experience. Video games and AI-driven worlds operate through desire-paths, quests, reward systems, and the mysticism of worldbuilding. Cinema has always been a desire-machine, and digital practice is full of rituals of seeking, touching, and invoking — showing how artists use these systems to create immersive experiences that resonate with the sacred, the mystical, and the affective. By centering desire as the affective engine of these encounters, the series illuminates the pull toward the sacred, the immersive, and the transformative, highlighting how contemporary digital practice can generate new forms of spiritual and phenomenological engagement.

Curated by Zaiba Jabbar, a curator, researcher, award-winning director, and founder of HERVISIONS, a femme-focused curatorial agency and platform producing innovative commissions, exhibitions, and events at the intersection of art, technology, and culture.

ali eslami
Iranian artist based in Amsterdam, Ali Eslami works with virtual reality, interactive simulation, film, writing, installation, and performative lectures. Drawing on non-Western philosophies such as Suhrawardi’s Illuminationism, his work investigates temporal and spatial aspects of memory, human emotions and rationality, and computation. His engineering background and passion for video games fueled his fascination with cybernetics and an enormous curiosity about the creation of virtual worlds. His work has received the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Non-fiction (2016), the Golden Calf for Best Interactive (2020, with Mamali Shafahi), the Cremer Prize from the LWL-Museum Münster (2023), and the Wendy-Gutman Prize (2025).

support portuguese republic – culture, youth and sports / general direction of the arts. rtcp – network of portuguese theaters and cinemas.