Analyzing Divine Machinary as an “Art Movement”

A 45min deep dive video on an art movement that I sensed but had never seen named before, what Joshua Bushman calls “DIVINE MACHINARY”.

He begins with an online, digital artist creating an online interactive installation during a very interesting pocket of time for the internet called BLESSED BANDWIDTH. As Joshua Bushman, the youtube video editor, names it, a time of “digital sublimity” (a reference to a book, the Digital Sublime — see Library for more info).

He invokes an incredible quote from EM Forster:
”The Machine,' they exclaimed, 'feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.’” (The Machine Stops, 1909 — see Library for more info)

The density of detail is a critical tope of such a movement, which Joshua relates to HORROR VACUI: fear of empty space. This relates to the anxiety of the contemporary world and schizophrenia of hallucinatory visions, which is what gives the genre this religious dimension.

Joshua mentions this overlap with Cyberpunk, but considers Divine Machinery as its own categorical aesthetic and vision; a place where spirituality and machinery are indistinguishable from one another.

Joshua also includes Pyak’s artwork, who made TV Buddha. Pyak believed the TV was a one-way dictatorial medium — fundamentally techno pessimistic, but worthwhile. He contrasts it with BLESSED BANDWIDTH, by Gupta, which has a strange optimism to it.

In a more superficial way, there is a lo-res, almost naïve aesthetic that takes us back to a more hopeful era about the possibilities of Computer. Joshua relates this to the innocence of divinity, although I would argue Divine Machinery is about a renewal of our relationship to the internet and a desire to Try Again — maybe going back to a point where we took the wrong path.

He argues there is a kind of Animism spirituality operative, moreso than any Christian theology — despite the assumption that this is the case, due to some of the most famous works having integrated Christ or Maria.