Common Prayer
A collaborative digital altar
The ChorusTo construct an altar is to create a spatial-temporal experience made up of the things that we love: people, places, objects, sensations. An altar is a reinstatement of feeling close to something; a vessel for those things that have passed on but whose presence remains; a place to be protected and which we are protected by. Below is an exploration of digital visual practices that imagine new scripts for paying homage to who and what we remember. While distinct in form and content, together they operate as a crossroads for our memories, current conditions, and possible horizons.
Though this compilation itself is an altar to the entanglements of nature and technology, it is not just a visual experience. Music, candles, drawings, sand—these altars are sensorial and somatic, swapping the aesthetic insistence on seeing as a primary way of knowing for an embrace of “both/and” thinking. Literally made public by their inclusion in this collection, altars that originally sat on bedside tables or kitchen floors transform from private prayer to collaborative proposal. In the traditional sense of the word—altar as “God’s table”—many offer gifts to the mystical: bridging the gap between the living and the dead, allowing us to continuously co-create with our beloveds, to pay back our revolutionaries, to return, to kneel. Others bring us towards a more explicit relationship with the material world: a bird feeder, bookcase, dashboard, or fire.
If capital cuts us off from collective lineages, how do the archival mechanisms of the internet allow us to refuse an amnesiac world order? We hope that this compilation—a sharing of histories, griefs, joys, and dreams—allows us to find each other horizontally while refusing the gaze of the state. Our altar is flickering and evolving; we invite you to place something on it by emailing ATMsubbox@gmail.com an image, text, or sound.
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