God in the machine: decoding the art of Divine Machinery

As a relaxed agnostic, I’ve never thought that much about God. Even less about divinity merging with technology. That idea always seemed like something that would crop up in a conversation with that weird guy at an afters. My interest in God and the divine lies more in the realms of Ethel Cain and browsing religious trinkets on eBay. Who needs prayer when you can listen to Perverts? Maybe that’s why my TikTok algorithm has been spewing Divine Machinery videos at me. Aesthetics Wiki (my trusted source) defines Divine Machinery as “a contemporary aesthetic which blends themes of technology with religion, focusing on the artificial and associating it with the divine.” The aesthetic overwhelmingly draws from Christianity, a religion that arguably has the biggest visual arsenal of martyrdom, ritual and sacred hardware to remix.

Although the aesthetic has gained popularity online over the past few years, evolving into a trend of image slideshows of neon-lit cathedrals and psalms glitching on TV screens, its core imagery has been seeping into contemporary art for a while now. Symbols such as crucifixes, saints and sacred hearts have long fascinated artists seeking to explore themes of transcendence and human-machine interaction. This fascination goes beyond just aesthetic appeal; it reflects the enduring influence of Christian iconography in Western culture, where even secular spaces are shaped by its visual language.

@st4rrycatt mecore #fyp #xyzbca #divinemachinery #divinemachines ♬ Untitled #9 (Smáskífa 1) – Sigur Rós

If you’ve seen films like The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina, you’re probably familiar with the long cultural obsession with machine consciousness and the fusion of technology and spirituality. It might seem strange, as humans created machines, to attach ideas of divinity to them, but this impulse has worked its way down from blockbusters into an algorithmic social media aesthetic that evokes a nostalgic, idolised vision of a lost or ‘better’ internet, signalling a merging of self with machine. We once accessed the internet through at-home devices; now we exist as part of it. There’s also a distinct visual aesthetic at play: if you follow the trend online, an image that consistently appears is artist Stane Jagodič’s Contemporary Golgotha from 1999 – a circuit board assemblage with a metal figurine of Jesus welded onto the centre. The piece is from his Digital Constructivism series he created from the 1980s to the early ‘00s, which features other works that fuse Christian iconography with bits of technology.

Artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez once described his 1991 sculpture Sagrado corazón activo (Sacred active heart) as a “new Christian iconography”. An almost cyberpunk-ified Damien Hirst, the piece features a hyperrealistic heart preserved in formaldehyde, beating inside a crucifix vitrine, hooked up to medical devices. The work interlaces a beloved Catholic symbol with machinery to explore how modern technology interacts with paranormal beliefs and Christian theology. It’s a dark, thoughtful reflection on death and resurrection. Cildo Meireles’ installation Babel from 2001 similarly references the cold, rigorous conception of technology, imbued with religious meaning. This “tower of incomprehension” is built from hundreds of radios, each tuned to a different station, referencing the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens.

In 2003, Shilpa Gupta created Blessed Bandwidth, a website that offered visitors a chance to receive a ‘blessing’ through a network cable which the artist had blessed by religious leaders and places of worship. This cable was presented online as a conduit, inviting users to symbolically connect through it. Gupta made a powerful connection between divinity and digital communication by framing internet access as a sacred and spiritual experience, offering interactive visuals and ritualistic prompts. In regions where internet access is limited, browsing online can feel like entering a privileged, almost sacred space – which Gupta critiques by highlighting the unequal distribution of bandwidth and suggesting that for many, getting access is like receiving a blessing, not a right. In the work, content censorship can be seen as analogous to religious control of thought and speech. Just as religious institutions have historically mediated access to the divine, governments and tech companies mediate (or block) access to the ‘truth’ online.

With the internet becoming publicly available in the early ‘90s, these artists had a new world at their fingertips, and were no doubt grappling with questions about the future of technology and what that could mean for faith and human existence – ideas at the core of Divine Machinery. As science demystifies nature, the unknown migrates to technology and the machine becomes the divine.

At an initial glance, Divine Machinery appears to be an offshoot of the Catholic-core aesthetic – a romanticisation of Catholic devotion, or vice versa. But where Catholic-core emphasises traditional Christian symbolism and rituals, Divine Machinery reinterprets these through a current lens, reflecting our increasingly digital and interconnected world. Younger artists are now pushing this aesthetic into new territories, offering a provocative glimpse into possible futures and alternative realities. They invite us to think about the mysteries of living in an age of rapid digital advancement, particularly to a generation shaped by technology and increasingly disconnected from traditional religious institutions.

A powerful example of this can be found in the work of Racheal Crowther. In her 2022 installation, Qualified To Care, she transforms the familiar LED cross of a pharmacy sign into a glowing relic of social neglect. Repurposed to display footage of a day centre the day before its demolition, the sign becomes an icon of abandonment. Its cross-shaped form, once signifying care, now broadcasts absence, merging technological sanctity with bureaucratic failure. Like a corrupted symbol, it highlights the martyrdom of community spaces lost to austerity, broadcasting a message of mourning and embodying both reverence and critique in its mechanised glow.

This fusion of technological symbolism can also be found in artist Louis Morlæ’s exploration of how we engage with technology, and how its advancement is neither wholly utopian nor dystopian. Through digital manipulation and animation, Morlæ brings his android-like figures to life, almost playing a god himself to his creations. His recent show ‘$ID3FA££ $YNDR0M3’ at Rose Easton fused symbolic dysfunction and cosmic unease. His sculptural ‘safety devices’ mimic engineered precision but serve no real purpose, reflecting a faith in systems that can’t truly save. This tension between materials and existential anxiety taps into Divine Machinery’s core: the search for meaning in the mechanical and the spiritual strife of a world governed by invisible forces. In this way, Morlæ’s work also reflects the sacred – not in a traditional religious sense, but as a summoning of awe and ritual in the presence of systems beyond comprehension.

Other artists use elements of Divine Machinery to examine the body’s place in an increasingly digitised society. Anna Uddenberg focuses on technologised consumer culture and the synthetic performance of femininity. Her hypersexualised, faceless female sculptures blur the lines between real and artificial, reflecting a cyborgian tension central to Divine Machinery. Uddenberg explores divinity not through overt religious symbolism, but by channeling a kind of techno-spiritualism. Her figures echo religious icons in their posed stillness and exaggeration, but instead of offering transcendence, they reflect the worship of luxury and optimised bodies. In a similar realm, Agnes Questionmark’s work is rooted in the fusion of organic life with AI and biotechnology. Through sculptural installations and performance, she explores the hybridisation of human bodies with artificial materials, reflecting a world where the sacred is found in the synthetic and suggests a new kind of spirituality where the body itself becomes a vessel for technological transcendence.

Maggie Dunlap’s work offers a gothic interpretation of Divine Machinery. She often reinterprets sacred symbols through the lens of digital culture, femininity and horror aesthetics. While some of her work is partially rooted in Catholic aesthetics, her engagement with surveillance, digital manipulation and artificiality extends into Divine Machinery territory. Her work explores how the internet is a distinctly haunted realm and challenges the power structures of both traditional religion and digital culture, reflecting an era where control, worship and transcendence are increasingly mediated through machines.

As machines continue to moderate our lives, maybe Divine Machinery is just another way for us to romanticise the sterile, stark tech we surround ourselves with. For the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world, machines have taken on an almost cult-like reverence. The boundary between human and algorithmic behaviour grows ever blurrier as we scroll through curated feeds that reflect us back to ourselves. Motifs of glitching monitors, monolithic transmission towers and abandoned data centres capture an eerie kind of worship and devotion. Gaining its own kind of ‘-core’ categorisation on social media, Divine Machinery now reads like visual scripture for a digital age.

While I don’t personally feel that we’re getting closer to any kind of revelation or higher power through technology, it’s interesting to see how Divine Machinery has evolved and filtered through to a generation of artists trying to locate meaning in systems they no longer trust, from religion to healthcare to technology itself. Divine Machinery doesn’t just aestheticise belief – it autopsies it and reconstructs it through the logic of the machine. In a time where algorithms feel more omniscient than any god, it’s not surprising that younger artists are now turning to their own forms of DIY belief systems. In a world governed by invisible data and digital ghosts, maybe the only way to find the divine is to build it yourself.