Where monotheistic religions know their Gods to be in control of earthly matter, shaped, formed and created by them; in Pantheologies we find a God that is matter, where matter is animate and God is multiple. Instead of a faith which fuels the great divide, it is a faith that entangles all things in related dependencies. The internet is charged with a vitality heralded at the invention of electricity. Electrical theologians, drawn by the not-of-this-world nature of the electrical spark, subscribed to the idea of anima mundi, the living world soul, a connection between all living things they saw as being manifest in electricity (Davis 2015).
Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters by Mary-Jane Rubenstein (2018) calls on the figure of Pan to disrupt, cause pan-ic and monstrously collide the binaries of human, non-human; male, female; animate, inanimate.
This piece depicts CyberPan - a machined translation of a plywood woodcut - 3D scanned and rendered. Plywood is itself machined, the dark layers of glue exposed by the carving process reveal a topography. The frame’s crenellations create the form of a carrier bag, a container for a new story (Le Guin 1986).
Cultivating metaphorical thinking uncovers and undermines the fictions that we live by; ones that are capitalist and bent on growth and consumption. The patterns that we observe in the world are echoed in the infrastructure we build with the tools we hone. It therefore “…matters what worlds world worlds” (Haraway 2016, 12) what words we choose and what metaphors we (un)wittingly weave with.
CyberPan, 334mm(w) x 500mm(h), Oak & Velchromat Frame, Giclee Print.
