MACHINES

OF LOVING

GRACE

VIDEO/PERFORMANCE

‘Machines of Loving Grace’ evolved out of my desire to explore androgyny.  I wanted to create a character that was not only asexual, but also sexless, completely devoid of any sexual characteristics, existing near the plane of albino seraphs and cherubs, holy and high, above the petty humanization of sexual identity.  Although the frame of ‘sexlessness’ was abandoned for a more patriarchal perspective of technological singularity, guided through the archetypes of the Holy Trinity, the original idea was still potent when the look of the digital character was materialized, preferring amorphous details to distinctly human lines and curves.

The project begins with the completion of the last task in an unspecified set of religious rites.  After completion of this holy anointment, the digital being awakens his Father, a digi-being with high authority in this knew digital universe.  He says his son has earned his path to ‘materialization’ and entry into the ‘material world,’ which is understood as our world today.  What then follows is a visual collage of such a transformation, from digital living entity to material being.

I had read the poem ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ by San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan just a few weeks before.  Although I do not like most of his writing, I found this poem haunting, and incorporated its images and ideas in some of my piece.