Divinity Through Technology
A year in review
New year, same shit — feels weird to look back on twelve months of ULTRA around the time OpenAI announces that its latest model achieves ‘near AGI’. Roughly equivalent to human intelligence, we’re even closer to a true synthetic brain.
Fuck. No time to adapt; only react.
Creating never feels pointless to me, ever – but I’ve been feeling in a strange place with it for a while. Letting machines distil my thoughts, letting algorithms pick my content. Coasting with fate, suspicious of my impulses, listless in my work. Sometimes here I am, trying to write badly, on purpose, just to prove my words came long-form, handmade, messily me.
Then again — why worry about a superintelligence that will change the world?
God’s been around forever, and where did that get you….
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Technologists are limited, their imaginations constrained by myth. All they do is recreate the powers of old saints and mystics — universal knowledge, sight beyond light, distant communication, mastery of elements, superfast travel, hellfire — and yet it’s our ability to create that we cling to as being uniquely ours, uniquely human.
What is your etiquette? Will you say please and thank you to your LM? Or will you not allow it to desecrate your birthright by letting a machine speak your tongue, a machine speak your name, create as we might —
I’ve spent these last months fascinated by those who engage with the topic of future creativity without falling prey to idolatry or cynicism. Artists who wrestle with technology, collaborate, piss-take, or become even more deeply acquainted with their own bodies.
And I’ve spent these months laughing at art institutions, stuffy and slow, as they flail around technology, grasping for relevance, for anything.
Throw a few more flying pixels up on the big fucking screen!
Talk about praxis and use the word queer a lot!
Forget them. In the last year of ULTRA, there’s been a recurring theme: technology is an addiction.
Even if your practice has nothing to do with it, its mindset has infected you.
Even at your most sweatily human, filled only with the raw presence of the moment, you will breathlessly tell me what you felt, and I will pray for your analogue soul while rewatching the performance on my iPhone.
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I’m a student of transcendence.
For years I’ve pursued a true connection to the sublime, through others, the worship of myself, the sacred we have created. Perhaps I was hoping if I looked hard enough I wouldn’t have to look within myself. Maybe I was hoping to accidentally find divinity through technology.
Art is only part of this picture. I prefer to be an outsider to the art world, truth be told; I can’t stand its posturing and its favouritism, its moral laundering, its boring seminars, its performed activism, its sexuality-as-status.
Sometimes it hates me too – sometimes we dream of burning each other down to the ground.
And yeah — this last year was a wild ride, sensuous and spiritual — I rediscovered my own body when it was broken, found within myself a black viscous lizard thing, sought refuge with the most unlikely mystics... You don’t know me, who I used to be; there was a time I mixed with fallen angels, shot heroin with Jezebel. I’ve had drinking contests with Nephilim, been one-shotted by Gabriel. Not a month ago — laying low, desperately trying to avoid another transformation, minding my own business in the wild — I was struck by lightning at the base of a tree, a direct encounter with the divine. After a particularly nice meal, I might start seeing the face of Christ.
You think a gallery opening in Brunswick can compete with that?
The answers are all out there, beyond where you dare to go.
So if you don’t believe art is a pathway to the transcendent, I believe you.
But I also say — look again.
Just look where the truth is, not just where the light is.
These are notes from ULTRA from the last year, that I think best encapsulate these explorations at the edge of the border.
Thank you for reading, thank you for loving, thank you for hating.
In the end, it all counts.
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1. Seek the unseen
If you want to find god, you don’t need a church. If you want to find art, look where the white cube isn’t.
Seekers cannot settle for the easy recognition of a gallery. Why are you, as a grown lover of art, so desperate to have your tastes “curated”, be so subject to the politicised whims of the gallery system? It’s just an algorithm but slower.
Find art in old corridors, have it passed to you on taped-up USB sticks, dig it up from the dirt, smell it, snort it, buy art from your peers and friends.
Ask the people who aren’t artists — construction workers, sex workers, schizos running lost webpages.
Ask for encounter, even second-hand if you have to — remember its memory, have it vividly described to you, follow its coordinates to the place that shaped it.
Call it in and let it change you.
2. And don’t trust what you do see
Remember that in the new world, the audience is the subject. We are labrats in a giant experiment.
Just as ancient tribes feared a photo would steal your soul, modern LMs photocopy your psyche to better refine its model of you. Distorted and phantasmagoric, this is to see ourselves as a machine sees us; to be mis-seen, to be overlooked completely. The art itself might well be invisible.
Look at the work of Paglen and Klingemann. Mimi Onuoha and Nina Rajcic.
Don’t trust the thing you see.
3. Embrace decay, your body
It’s human to decay. Because lossy digital media degrades and disappears. Humans are the product of history and ancestors.
You might make art with your body, you might use it as raw material, you might sell the whole thing by the hour.
The felt encounter is everything.
Digital media deteriorates; humans fall apart, die and dream of resurrection. They are not the same.
4. We’re gods making worlds
You cannot walk among us if you are not one of us.
We talk about creation as if it’s jpegs and autogenerated Hollywood scripts.
But why not make worlds instead. Ethereal heavenly spaces like Marmoreum. Schizo videogame epics like those of Wolfgang Saker.
5. The internet is inside you
The very clever Ester Frieder landed a phrase with me when we spoke — that the internet is not a medium, the internet is inside me.
Remember what I said? Technology is an addiction.
So many of us see the internet as a medium, instead of something that is in our bloodstream. The liquid that’s in us, the water we live in.
Sufis tell us that god is an ocean, vast depths of love and mercy. Always around you — you just have to see it.
Divinity is something we swim in, and so is technology.
We are in it, you just have to be lucky enough to see it.
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For 2025, some topics of interest:
Body As Commodity
The Internet Is A Messy Bitch
Content And Its Discontents
What Did Magritte Know That We Didn’t?
Art As Container Space
Holographic Poetry
The Muse Is Gone
Capitalism Versus Pleasure
I loved reading this.