Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Prayer Antenna
A bizarre gizmo from Paul Davies is probing prayer. A helmet with antenna is fixed to a wall. The antenna receive sounds from the gallery space and channel these inside the helmet. Artists blurb here.'The interactivity is the simple act of kneeling and putting your head into the helmet. What you hear is other people (what is god if not other people?)'
I dismissed this piece quite quickly when I first saw it on WMMNA this morning but it's been bugging me all day. Prayer never seems an easy thing to do at the best of times but this piece did get me thinking about a few things. Initially I guess I didn't like the way it reduced God to 'other people' and ignored prayer as a more direct form of encounter with God. A trail of thoughts then ensued:
Other people shape our understanding of God. This could be from friends and family but equally it could be from authors. artists or communities of people (churches?) who have carried a faith that we have then inherited. These voices all mould and circumscribe our understanding of God. They define God to a certain extent. How much then are we listening to God and how much are we listening to the perceptions of God that we have inherited from the voices of others? Our inheritance might help us connect with God but will also limit our understanding of God. Are all these voices helping us to hear God or just getting in the way of listening, are they noise? There's also something going on in the contrast between ritual and technology: The ritual action inherent in the piece removes you from a (gallery) space and immerses you in technological apparatus that re-focusses your attention on the sounds and expressions of those you're still physically sharing a space with. Prayer becomes about removing yourself from a situation to try and listen to it. (Albeit assisted by apparatus that is somewhere between a B-movie science experiment, the SETI programme and an old folks hair parlour.)
It's amazing how much an old crash helmet and a bunch of radio antenna can bug me.
