A Search for the Divine (Machine)
The search for the Divine — or the Sacred — has long occupied a central place in aesthetics. Across history, artists have experimented with the tangibilities of faith through realism and symbolism, and abstraction: at times distilling belief into form, and at others interrogating the very structures that uphold it. The medium of expression often parallels the faith systems it inhabits, since the artist’s beliefs are brought to fore; they take the shape through devotion to a God, a deity or a prophet, a religious figure, or an ancestral connection to Earth, or an intimate ritual of individual prayer and meditation. It forms the subject matter within an artistic work, articulating an exercise or journey of the artist’s faith. In this sense, art can be read as a testament to both individual and collective relationships with faith; the finished piece holds significance as a means of historicising and preserving belief (or, equally, our distance from it).
Within this discourse, divinity is no longer concerned with moral correction or imposition of a doctrine, but instead operates under a resonance that binds humanity. One does not need to belong to the same faith to perceive beauty, rather, divine aesthetics afford an openness that exceeds formal articulation. In its visual language, there is an invitation to feel and understand.
What moves us in these works? Is it the invocation of symbols rendered powerful through familiarity, or is it the sudden tangibility of what is otherwise understood as distant and ineffable? Perhaps a sacred quality is inherently embedded in any depiction of the Divine, as the labour of representing faith demands one’s submission. Here, the vastness of divinity unfolds in multiplicities: God is One (as in Christianity, Catholicism, Islam), God is many (as in Hinduism, Taoism, or Greek traditions), or embodied within systematised philosophies (such as Buddhism, Sufism, or Indigenous practices including Ifá, Māori, or Navajo cosmologies), and God exceeds certain languages of faith altogether.
As technological conditions evolve, so too does the meaning and expression of Divine Machinery. What began as a niche interest among contemporary artists has expanded into a collective discourse, particularly within online creative communities. Here, Divine Machinery operates as a form of witnessing God (or the Divine) within the machine, where the abstract or distant quality of the belief is made tangible through technology. In this case, we witness the emergence of a renewed understanding of divinity: one that imbues the sacral aesthetic with an eerie and unsettling character.
How does God become tangible when fashioned by humanity? The fusion of the artificial and the sacred introduces a perceived darkness, often labelled blasphemous, particularly in contemporary art, design, and meme culture that reworks Christian and Catholic iconography. Yet this framing can also be understood through Indigenous ontologies in which divinity permeates all things.
In more recent decades, the search for the Divine has given rise to an aesthetic concerned with the conception and expression of divinity through and in conjunction with — the Machine. This aesthetic, often referred to as Divine Machinery, emerged in the 1990s alongside the birth of the internet, marking humanity’s formal entry into the digital age. The change demanded interrogation, and artists began to question how technology was integrating into everyday life; becoming an entity that ruptured established notions of reality and warped the conditions of existence. The internet poses an invisible reach that provokes a collective reckoning towards human life, particularly regarding the relationships to faith. With a power that pervades human capacity, the logic of the machine came to (seen as) a Super Entity: its indispensability increasingly likened to the divine quality of all-encompassing being.
This tension is frequently articulated through the juxtaposition of religious emblems and machine-like entities, suggesting that, much like religion, technology has become a pervading yet ominous presence. These inquiries materialise powerfully in the work of José Antonio Hernández-Díez, whose assemblage of a cross, a machine, and the human heart stands as a defining articulation of Divine Machinery. His work foregrounds the intertwining of machine and faith, catalysing collective questioning around divinity in the so-called digital age.
Today, the once-theorised separation between the digital and the “real” has collapsed; the two are fully enmeshed in contemporary existence. The speculative warnings issued by earlier artists have materialised into lived reality, and the divinity of the Machine has taken shape into its own articulation of belief. This does not suggest that technology has replaced religion, but rather that it has become integral to our being; shaping our bodies, minds, and, by extension, our beliefs. Algorithms and artificial intelligence, under the promise of convenience, have fostered deep reliance; offering new ways of making sense of the world. Our ideas, interests, and identities become curated through technological systems. Technology does not merely mediate belief; it becomes a a way of thinking about belief. Now, the machine is no longer distant, it becomes us.
Technologist Neema Githere articulates this perspective succinctly: “Spirit is present in every machine.” Here, God is embedded in being itself, and technology is understood as sentient. This shift in beliefs is reflected in a change of iconography: away from reworking traditional religious emblems toward visual languages of cables, code, machines merging with bodies and soil, and monumental structures of electrical power. In essence, Neema likens technology to land, calling them “sources of life.” Recent iterations of Divine Machinery increasingly take the form of videos and digital works that document attempts to “find God” through these relational networks. Shibani Mitra, for instance, is a content creator who has resonated with a wide audience for capturing the embeddedness of God-consciousness into everyday life. “I see God everywhere,” her videos claim. Thus, Divine Machinery exceeds its initial role as commentary on the sacred qualities of technology, and offers instead an expanded ontology through which technology is perceived as spiritually entangled.
Through Divine Machinery, we learn of the fluid character of the Divine as its conceptions and meanings follow along with the evolution of human consciousness. As art has always done, contemporary expressions of Divine Machinery do not attempt to define faith, but rather to witness its transformation. As machines become inseparable from our bodies, minds, and ways of knowing, belief remains relational and reshaped by the structures that govern our existence. In tracing these convergences, art becomes both an archive and a speculative terrain: preserving how the sacred has been understood, while asking where divinity now resides when the spiritual, the human, and the technological are no longer separate.
