playSdWav1.play(“absolution”); (2017), an interactive speaker which plays the absolution prayer, stemmed from an idea that I was thinking about when in the process of making Untitled. Questioning what it means to be a Catholic in contemporary society and what it means to represent yourself with its beliefs, I began thinking about how its repetitions can almost become mechanical or robotic. In Maurice Halbwachs’ writing, he discusses the idea of a collective memory shared with two or more members of a social group. My work describes the collective memory of Catholic ritual, shared between peers.
In small Irish towns, like the one in which I grew up, communities perform a kind of theocracy, using religion as a mode of representation, without the actual commitment of attending church and living virtuously. Visiting churches throughout my childhood, one image that I found particularly striking, even comical, was the mechanised candle, triggered by inserting coins and replacing the traditional candle; the over-engineering of a traditionally spiritual process seems absurd. Similar to the electric votive candle, the device playSdWav1.play(“absolution”); will take the money and in return, it will say the absolution prayer and cleanse the sins of the user. This device fast tracks the process of having to go to confession and refects the awkward clashes between contemporary technology and pious religion.
In this work I use the coin as a symbol of capitalism, using money as a tool to make your soul spiritually cleaner than the less wealthy. Within my work playSdWav1.play(“absolution”);, a microcontroller is connected to a distance sensor that triggers the audio, programmed in software called Arduino. The audio in this work was designed to sound mechanical and have a rapid style; this produced the jarring aesthetic I was looking for, inserting the technological into the religious.