Digital Altar
This is a space to collectively name and grieve the wounds, the impacts of the industrial and digital age, of ‘progress’…an an invitation to map the digital age onto your ancestry, to make abstract systems concrete.
Digital Altar was created with a dear friend and software engineer, Gyan Prayaga <3 make sure to check out the rest of Gyan’s work!
Mission Statement
Can the internet hold our grief? Can the internet be a collaborator in creating sacred space and ritual? Can we be devastated together, online? Can we digitally honor the suffering that connects us all? Can technology reflect back our divinity? Thanks to the work of Skawennati, Abeba Birhane, Neema Githere, Alice Yuan Zhang, and Yuk Hui (to name just a few whose work inspires this project), we know the colonial imagination has suppressed the radical possibilities of the internet and technology broadly. Crafted with ancient, reemerging values, we know the internet could be the web that reflects back our interconnectedness. In the West, we’ve yet to see technology created from the womb of divine feminine force because of false dichotomies between progress and healing, the natural and the technological, the logical and the intuitive.
This is an experimental digital space for grief—a space to contemplate how all our sorrows are connected. Here, we hope to tend to the fibers (stories) between us to make these threads of solidarity stronger! This is a space to name the wounds, the impacts of the industrial and digital age, of ‘progress,’ of global capitalism and colonialism. It’s an invitation to map the digital age onto your ancestry, to make abstract systems concrete. It’s a site where past, present, and future collide, to understand a larger tapestry of ‘modernity.’ What did we think we were gaining? What have we actually lost? Now, what’s most important?
There’s no ‘right’ way to interact with this altar. There’s a ritual generator and questions for contemplation that you’re welcome to try, and we also invite you to bring your own ritual lineages, ancestral grief practices, and ideas to this space. We hope this digital altar can hold the complexity of the impact of technology—grief for the losses and gratitude for its advantages. It’s not a space for cynicism, instead, hopefully it can exist as a piece of evidence of technology that gives us agency, that doesn’t compromise our humanness or collective liberation. It is also a mini digital apothecary imagining that some of the antidotes to the wounds of progress lie in the scraps of technology already created. We want to challenge the accepted narrative of artificial intelligence takeover to imagine sentient machines and algorithms just as invested in the thrival of our ecosystems as Mother Earth.
There’s not a life global capitalism and colonialism haven’t touched. And, like Aurora Levins Morales writes, even the most privileged are ultimately disadvantaged by these ways of relating to the world:
“Much of the pursuit of privilege is based on a misconception about what constitutes security. It is based on acquiring material and cultural resources that are denied to others while surrendering integrity, awareness, and most of our potential relationships…The benefits of privilege do include more reliable access to the basic necessities of life, but most of the so-called benefits are liabilities when it comes to the survival of the human species.”
- Aurora Levins Morales
FAQ
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“We are the continuation of our ancestors. We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors and also all their painful qualities. Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations. We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves but for the benefit of all our ancestors and all our descendants.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
“We live in a culture that perpetually idealizes progress. We’re always moving forward. However, in the process we often abandon history. In a sense, we abandon the dead. But the dead are still with us. Much of the sorrow that’s in our bodies is inherited…We are the current curators of the sorrow. It didn’t necessarily begin in my lifetime, it began generations ago. It could have begun as a consequence of a rupture of connection to a homeland…So why is it useful to talk about the ancestors? Well, in part because we want to understand the depth and breadth of what it is we are being asked to face and to deal with. There’s another part, too. We need their help. They need our help. In the ancient ecologies, it was understood very clearly that the dead are not gone. They are still living in our dreams and in our bodies, in our moods and in our feelings, in the places where we struggle. Asking them to participate in our rituals is part of reestablishing that deep ecology of the sacred.” — Francis Weller
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“Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer
“How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership.” — Aurora Levins Morales
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“The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” — Paul Shepard
“Deep healing is what happens when we shift the histories that our bodies and communities hold. It happens when we are no longer defined by or experiencing ourselves through past disconnection, past violence, past betrayal, and disregard. Instead, we re-member our connection with ourselves, with our communities, with the land and spirit.” — Susan Raffo
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We are not collecting your data. You are empowered to leave behind any data, any stories you’d like to share publicly through notes. If you feel moved to share a screenshot of your interaction with the altar, please send it to veroscartoonworld@gmail.com. Otherwise, pictures uploaded will disappear once you refresh the page; no one else, including the creators of the altar, will see your pictures. Wisdom you leave can only be received at random once, then it’s gone. Notes left at the altar are permanent, but they may pile up, be buried, or get rearranged.
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We hope to have more community offerings exploring digital grief and communal memory soon! Stay tuned.