BLACK – Archived Project (2012 – 2025)

1. Introduction

It all began with a deceptively simple question, emerging from the shadows of our entanglement with technology: Who is praying when a Buddhist monk turns his prayer wheel? Is it truly the monk—or the wheel itself? What remains if we attempt to mechanize the will?

This project explores the mechanization of practices historically and culturally rooted in human ritual and meaning. It asks: what happens when spiritual labor is offloaded to machines?

BLACK was conceived as a kind of service—a system—inviting participation in a re-articulation of reality. In its speculative logic, this utopian reality is shaped by a ritualistic act: an endless loop of writing data to computer memory. This looping act generates particular electromagnetic fields inside each computer, and—according to Rupert Sheldrake’s controversial theory of morphic resonance—the “resonation-quantity” of these fields imbues the data with a kind of power, a vibratory signature that writes itself directly into the cosmos, dependencies and all.

The name BLACK is inspired by Vilém Flusser’s Black Box concept: the mysterious transformation between Input (written prayers), Output (ephemeral overview), and the unknowable process in-between—BLACK as the application, the system, the VOICE.

2. BLACK

BLACK is a long-term conceptual project, structured—though intentionally obfuscated—into three interlinked components:

TOOL

A web interface for obscure collectives—primarily exhibition visitors—to inscribe their desires, prayers, and texts. Originally presented at:

Visitors could write and submit their entries through a simple form. These texts were not just stored, but lived—looped into memory, layered with repetition, echoing through machines.

APPS

This section housed three downloadable Trojan-horse-like applications:

These playful, slightly ironic tools contained a hidden daemon: a silent, continuous act of praying in the background. On launch, each app would retrieve new prayers from the TOOL database and loop through them in memory. They were designed to run at startup, embedding themselves quietly in the daily life of unsuspecting users. At its peak, BLACK’s network of background processes had looped over 411 user-submitted texts more than 41 billion times.

VOICE

The most elusive part of BLACK. Occasionally, in dark hours, users might stumble into its digital sanctum—a webspace offering fragmented access to archived prayers. But only at specific times, under specific conditions. A reminder service was provided, yet access remained cryptic by design.

This tripartite system was essential. The project’s hypothesis demanded a strict division:

To observe the mechanization of will, one must first exclude human will. The prayers gain presence through oblivion.

3. Resume

How long must BLACK run before monks and nuns may rest, freed from the tireless repetition of their sacred labor for peace and goodness?

Since its inception, BLACK looped the cycle over 41 billion times, circling through 411 unique human entries—digitally whispered into the void.

As of now, BLACK is no longer running. The experiment has been archived. Its servers are quiet. The prayers sleep.

But somewhere, in the hollow hum of old machines, you might still imagine that echo:
data dreaming of devotion,
code mimicking care,
a ghostly resonance of something once believed, now replaced by ubiquitous ML.