Himala
as Mysteries of the Rosary

Prayer is deeply intertwined with tallying and computation. The rosary is no exception: a tool for meditation & intercession that might also be the greatest collective computer. Its prayer is a form of computation itself.

Himala consists of at least twenty net art pieces, each representing a mystery of the rosary underneath the four main categories (leaving space open to the addition of new mysteries.) While the rosary is prayed in accordance to a specific set of prayers, the repetitive prayers intertwine with live narrative acts of each mystery the computation is meditated towards – weaving into each other.

To be published online in sequences, assigned to days of the week – the mysteries of the rosary are reimagined as a series of net art pieces, rewriting the intercessory narratives to center the Virgin Mary's perspective. The works weave into each other, repeating, looping, unbounded – but repetition is the beginning of devotion.

To let the rosary live online itself is a manifestation of its form as an infrastructure. I'm interested in live prayer feeds, networked faith and spirituality, and the ways the Bible acts as a primitive / original hypertext. If the Bible takes this form, the Rosary might moreso – itself originated from communal gatherings, a choice tool for practitioners at the peripheries without access to normal devotionals.

Zoë Sofia's Container Technologies discusses the femininity of container technologies; object-systems that protect, storage, intercess; Le Guin posits the first human tool as a vessel. Prayer is infrastructure; the Rosary is infrastructure, and the saintly body of Mary carries. (As she contained a material god) The browser, operating system, terminal, and website too, are vessels. I have long been interested in their maternal qualities: their wetness, virginity, purity, machinic, ritual potentialities. (Computers turn us all into Girl-Saints.)