Digital Altar

You are about to enter the digital altar. Before you can do so, we need to gain access to your webcam. This will be used to enhance your altar experience - you will neither be recorded nor any video data uploaded.

The Digital Altar is best viewed on a larger screen, such as a laptop or desktop computer.

About

“We are ritual creatures. Watch children—they’re constantly generating rituals of some sort or another. We’re wired for it…people are longing for the permission to speak about it. We’re afraid to talk about it because it’s become so private and whatever becomes private carries a certain mantle of shame around it.

It’s also a secret longing because if you walk down the street and look carefully, you can see it in everybody’s eyes. And if we stop anybody and say, “Are you okay?” and if they could really trust the question, they would say, “No, my heart is breaking. I’m utterly lost. I don’t know what to do. But thank you for asking.”

We need a place. It can be very simple and small: Invite a few friends. Serve good food and drinks. Light a candle, say a poem or a prayer. Ask for some support and help to face what, at times, feels overwhelming and dense and impossible to carry on our own. I’ve seen this literally thousands of times with people who’ve come to these gatherings. There is this sense of spaciousness that begins to open around the heart once we can begin to acknowledge fully the depth of sorrows that we carry.”

— Francis Weller

Can the internet hold our grief? Can the internet be a collaborator in creating sacred space and ritual? Can we be devastated together, online? Can we digitally honor the suffering that connects us all? Can technology reflect back our divinity? Thanks to the work of Skawennati, Abeba Birhane, Neema Githere, Alice Yuan Zhang, and Yuk Hui (to name just a few whose work inspires this project), we know the colonial imagination has suppressed the radical possibilities of the internet and technology broadly. Crafted with ancient, reemerging values, we know the internet could be the web that reflects back our interconnectedness.

This is an experimental digital space for grief—a space to contemplate how all our sorrows are connected. Here, we hope to tend to the fibers (stories) between us to make these threads of solidarity stronger! This is a space to name the wounds, the impacts of the industrial and digital age, of ‘progress,’ of global capitalism and colonialism. It’s an invitation to map the digital age onto your ancestry, to make abstract systems concrete. It’s a site where past, present, and future collide, to understand a larger tapestry of ‘modernity.’ What did we think we were gaining? What have we actually lost? Now, what’s most important?

We hope this digital altar can hold the complexity of the impact of technology—grief for the losses and gratitude for its advantages. It’s not a space for cynicism, instead, hopefully it can exist as a piece of evidence of technology that gives us agency, that doesn’t compromise our humanness or collective liberation. It is also a mini digital apothecary imagining that some of the antidotes to the wounds of progress lie in the scraps of technology already created. We want to challenge the accepted narrative of artificial intelligence takeover to imagine sentient machines and algorithms just as invested in the thrival of our ecosystems as Mother Earth.

Ritual Generator

Gather some offerings - forgotten hardware - old keyboards, broken anything, tangled cables, dead batteries, cracked screens, PC pieces, scraps of things once ‘useful’ to you but now dusty and disconnected, uncharged.

Arrange your offerings in front of your computer screen without overthinking it, it’s time to recharge them with new intentions.

Upload pictures or visual representations of your ancestors to the altar.

Take 10 deep breaths to open up the space within you for deep listening. Maybe play music if that’s something that grounds you.

Ask the following questions aloud to your ancestors and then close your eyes. In the darkness, surrender to how answers will appear.

Tell me the stories your body never got to speak. Where did your body hold the pain of ‘progress’? Where was your stiffness pent up? In what ways did you long to move your body but couldn’t?

Thank your ancestors for their vulnerability. Be patient and answers may come unexpectedly, days or weeks later. Now, your forgotten hardware is reprogrammed—opening a new channel between you and your ancestors. Perhaps leave your offering somewhere prominent and sacred in your space as a reminder of your intention to look back to move forward.

Upload pictures of the machines your ancestors intimately interacted with. Maybe you don’t know what machines they interacted with—time for some sacred research! Family Search has extensive records. Where did your ancestors live? Did they use transportation? How did they sustain themselves?

Take 10 deep breaths to open up the space within you for deep listening. Maybe play music if that’s something that grounds you.

Gather some offerings - take some files out of your computer trash bin.

Arrange your offerings on your desktop, intuiting what shape you'd like to create for a portal.

To open your desktop portal, recite the following spell aloud to the machines on your altar:

Hand in hand with my ancestors,
We recognize that matter
Reflects back inner worlds.
You did not ask to be created
In the name of greed and exploitation.
We will not allow your past
To define what futures last.
We invite you through this portal
As an accomplice in
Collective liberation.
Harmony between humans and our creations is possible because
Harmony between all of life is possible.

Upload pictures of native plants from your homelands. This is a great place to start if you need to do some research.

Take 10 deep breaths to open up the space within you for deep listening. Maybe play music if that’s something that grounds you.

Use the altar mirror as a tool to reflect back your divinity. Maybe you want to adorn yourself. Maybe you want to wear nothing at all. Whatever emotions are coursing through your body right now are perfect, and your reflection is able to receive them. Your reflection will mirror you—it will not shame you.

Once you’ve slowed down to meet yourself in this present moment, start shaking out your limbs to prepare a movement offering for the plants.

Ask the plants to help you metabolize your grief. Recite the following prayer aloud:

My wounds keep me awake
Close to the soil
Seeing through the illusion of skin
I map the gaps between
Stagnated knowing
Feeding off the nutrients of the dead
Like the plants taught me
We weep, we weep
Ancestral stream
A grief with roots this deep
Will only be released through the body
Magic is joy in new shape
We move to
Metabolize grief

Experiment moving like a plant. Try to grieve like a tree.

To close out, thank your plant accomplices for the biodiversity that keeps you healthy.

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