God Bless this Circuitry

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2007 by Tate Shaw

This portfolio is one of twelve fictional episodes involving a churchgoing father and son. Each part of the story is assembled out of the memory or use of a machine they have in common. The artists' book of the same name gets its title from the post-9/11 United States, just after the attacks, when the phrase "God Bless America" was omnipresent. The project points to two metaphors for the machine: that it resembles the mind and that it lacks humanity. The reference to religion plays a large part in the mind-machine metaphor. For instance, we may think of religious zealots as machines in that they are often hardwired and programmed through subjective readings of historical texts. Of course, we are aware that certain groups understand texts of the past to be prophecies of the future; millions of people believe in an afterlife and this belief dictates their contemporary existence. I see this as a form of machine-like automation. This automated state is explored in the book through the use of Christian propaganda. Tracts are printed ephemera: short-lived, freely circulated, often meant to alarm, instruct, and convert those who encounter them. In the book, pictures from such religious tracts provide arbitrary signifiers literally drawn as circuit lines to parts of the story. All of the images seen here came from an archive found in a filing cabinet, bought second-hand in Rochester, New York, by photographer Luke Strosnider who was unaware of the hundreds of propaganda items inside. The book, God Bless this Circuitry, is available from Preacher's Biscuit Books (www.preachersbiscuitbooks.com) and contains an accompanying CD of music by Andrew Sallee.

Nearly every morning I unzip a wrinkled, leather case to withdraw my father's electric razor. With one breath I clear a coating of white skin dust left from the previous day's shave.

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In these standing moments, when I reached my full height, my head would flash in the actual mirror reminding me of my smoother, less-traveled face without the surfacing map-lines of blood.

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Lack of circulation would routinely force me out of my crouch.

I kneeled on the tile before him.

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My father would be seated on the toilet in heavy cream light.

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The more time I spent staring at his growing nose and ears, or the unpleasant paths of blue, red, and purple lines, the further I felt from the reality of my own appearance.

My face was not repeated in my father's. In fact, there were no exactly similar parts, only exactly similar actions, Sunday-to-Sunday, sanding him down, studying his features.

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I scrub at my cheeks with the spinning blades inserting my fingertips now and then to judge for smoothness.

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Once, with the razor buzzing before my eyes, I saw the Christian Trinity symbol in the circular blades.

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For the next few minutes, rather than shave my face, I was determined to make the three-conjoined-circles-shape somewhere on my body:

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in a patch on my arm, a plot on my chest, on the crest of my stomach.

I worked at the areas my clothing would hide, but the razor couldn't get at the longish body hairs.

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Back when I used to shave my father for church, my face would be very close to his.

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Instead it flattened swaths or yanked out snippets. No trinity shape (or any discernible other, for that matter) could be made with the electric razor.

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