They proceeded with their heads bowed and the telephone in their hands, illuminated not by the uncertain flame of the candles, but by the cold light of the screens, while in front of them, carried on the shoulder like the statue of a saint or a cross during a procession, a large digital monitor advanced, engraved on the surface so that the light could filter through that artificial wound. Observing it from afar, the scene could have seemed like the religious celebration of a future that has now arrived, in which the simulacrum no longer has a human face, the lights have become smartphones and the voice that accompanies the journey does not come from a choir or a loudspeaker, but from dozens of devices synchronized through a technological system capable of transforming each participant into a part of the same liturgy.
It happened on 8 July in Bosco, a hamlet of San Giovanni a Piro, in Cilento, where he made his debut Sacred Machinethe artistic project signed by Max Magaldi and Matteo Mandelli and presented as the first digital procession ever created in Italy, conceived not to replace or mock a religious rite, but to use the symbolic power of the procession as a tool through which to observe what technology has become in contemporary life: no longer just a set of devices useful for communicating, working and getting information, but a system capable of directing behaviour, organizing time, absorbing attention and creating new forms of collective belonging.
The performance took place within the framework of MicroCosmsthe festival conceived by Vittorio Cosma and directed and curated together with Annarita Masullo of The Goodness Factory, scheduled until Sunday 12 July between San Giovanni a Piro, Bosco and Scario, places where contemporary art has entered not as a foreign body dropped from the outside, but as a presence built through comparison with the inhabitants, local institutions and the memory of a territory in which the processions, chapels and patronal festivals still represent a common and immediately recognizable language.
The procession in which the simulacrum becomes a machine
At the center of Sacred Machine there is an image as simple as it is disturbing: a digital screen is lifted and carried along the streets of the village with the same gestures, the same solemnity and the same collective disposition that traditionally accompany a sacred statue, while the device, crossed by an engraving made by the artists, stops being just a surface on which images flow to become an image itself, an object to follow and a presence around which the community gathers.
What opened the ritual was precisely the act of engraving the monitor, a gesture that physically crossed the technological surface in search of the light hidden within it, transforming what normally constitutes a smooth, intact and apparently impenetrable barrier into a gap through which to look, as if it were necessary to wound the screen to discover what lies behind the perfection of the digital image.
During the route, the spectators did not simply remain on the margins of the performance, because through a QR code they connected their smartphones to the work, allowing the devices to spread a digital litany that propagated from one person to another, filling the streets of the town and transforming the procession into a single sound organism, fragmented into dozens of individual phones but governed by the same sequence.
The same screens that usually isolate faces, absorb gazes and restrict everyone’s horizon to a few centimeters of glass have thus illuminated the collective path, replacing the lights of traditional processions and making clear a contradiction that accompanies every digital experience: tools designed to connect people can unite them within a common network, but at the same time continue to keep them separate, each gathered around their own device.
The invisible liturgy that we celebrate every day
The provocation of the work lies not only in the screen carried on the shoulder, which represents its most immediate and spectacular visual element, but in the recognition that some gestures performed daily with smartphones have already taken on the regularity, repetition and even posture of a ritual, although those who perform them continue to consider them private, spontaneous and fully controlled actions.
«With our heads down, when we scroll, write, comment, search, buy with the phone in our hands, we believe that that moment is ours, intimate, private», explains Max Magaldi. «Instead, in that very moment we are part of a new liturgy, collective and unconscious, during which we all give up the same things: data, attention, time, presence».
Millions of people, in different places and without knowing each other, repeat the same movements, respond to the same notifications, navigate through content selected by algorithms and entrust to the platforms a growing quantity of information, desires, habits and fragments of their identity, convinced that they are living an individual experience while actually participating in one of the largest collective phenomena in contemporary history.
Sacred Machine takes this liturgy out of the invisible space of the network and transforms it into a public rite, in which the mutual dependence between individual and system can no longer be ignored, because each smartphone contributes to the construction of the litany and each participant, while keeping their device in their hands, becomes part of a procession guided by a machine.
«Machina Sacra takes this liturgy and makes it visible», continues Magaldi, indicating separation not as a side effect of technology, but one of the principles around which the digital experience is organized. «Because separation is not a defect in the ritual. It’s the ritual. Separate us, all together.”
Not a criticism of faith, but a question of what we choose to follow
The use of the codes of religion inevitably makes the work provocative, especially in a territory in which processions retain a profound spiritual, social and identity meaning, but in the intentions of the artists the project does not want to question faith or reduce the sacred to a technological metaphor, because the true object of the investigation is the way in which symbols change and the human need to recognize oneself around something continues to find new forms.
“We didn’t want to question faith, but to observe how the symbols that cross our time change,” declared Matteo Mandelli. «The processions don’t just talk about religion: they talk about community, belonging and what we decide to follow».
The procession, even before being an ordered movement in space, is in fact a collective declaration: a community temporarily abandons private spaces, occupies the streets and chooses to proceed in the same direction, entrusting a shared image with the task of representing what it believes in, what it remembers or what it hopes to be protected from. Replacing that figure with a screen, Sacred Machine it doesn’t necessarily say that technology has become a religion, but it asks how much power we are willing to attribute to it, what decisions we entrust to it and to what extent algorithms have already begun to guide our path without needing to be recognized as authorities.
The digital “saint” does not speak, does not bless and does not promise salvation, but collects data, organizes information, distributes content and directs attention, exercising a power that is all the more penetrating the more it manages to present itself as neutral, invisible and built exclusively to respond to the desires of those who use it.
Artificial intelligence enters the ritual space
The project inevitably fits into the debate on the relationship between the human person and artificial intelligence, which no longer concerns only industrial applications or work transformations, but now affects the construction of identity, cultural production, memory, communication and even the way in which communities interpret the concept of presence.
In Bosco’s procession, artificial intelligence and the digital system did not limit themselves to offering technical support to the performance, but constituted its hidden structure, connecting smartphones, regulating the experience and transforming a plurality of personal devices into a single widespread voice, capable of accompanying the procession and implicitly indicating times and methods of participation.
The issue is therefore not only what artificial intelligence manages to do, but the authority that is progressively recognized, often without a real conscious act of delegation, while automated systems decide which news to show, which images to make visible, which paths to suggest and which contents to hide, becoming permanent intermediaries between the individual and the world.
The “faith” evoked by the title of the work does not necessarily coincide with a religious adherence, but with that daily act of trust through which one accepts that a device knows the best path, that a platform selects what deserves attention and that an algorithm can interpret tastes, emotions and needs better than the person himself.
A work built together with the village
Before occupying the streets, Sacred Machine went through a preparation phase in the spaces of Casa Ortega, the house that belonged to the Spanish realist painter José Ortega, anti-Franco and exile by choice in Bosco, which in the days preceding the performance became an open laboratory in which the artists met the community, the parish and the Pro Loco, discussing the meaning of the work and the possible reactions generated by the use of symbols so rooted in the local identity.
The artistic residency represented the first of the three moments in which the project was articulated: initially the dialogue and shared construction, then the activation of the work in the public space through the procession and finally the deposition in the Cappella del Carmine, where the screen will remain until the conclusion of MicroCosmi, transforming from a moving object to an immobile presence, offered to the gaze as a sort of contemporary exposition.
Once the procession ended, in fact, the monitor was not turned off and placed among the performance equipment, but placed inside the chapel, prolonging the time of the ritual and allowing the contrast between technology and sacred space to continue to produce questions even after the crowd had dispersed.
In this final passage lies perhaps the most significant image of Sacred Machine: a luminous machine remains inside a chapel, in the silence that follows the procession, no longer supported by the arms of men and no longer surrounded by the litanies of smartphones, but still capable of reflecting the light and the gazes of those who enter.
He is not a saint and does not pretend to become one, but occupies for a few days the place traditionally reserved for images to which a community entrusts questions, fears and hopes, forcing each visitor to ask himself what the presences that accompany daily life are today, what attention they require and what form of devotion, conscious or unconscious, we are now accustomed to granting them.
