Deus Vorax (2014)

In the Chapel of St Nicholas in the York church of Holy Trinity is a peculiar, gold-coloured installation of art work: Deus Vorax (2014). It is made out of a mixture of fibreglass, gilding and concrete. The artist’s spiel, which accompanies it, states:

'Tech' acts as a powerful solvent upon long established structures and relationships; things melt and meld together or drift apart and are warped into new forms.

The personal and private become public, synthetic and organic merge and mutate and in this brave new world of silicon and AI new gods are raised.

The quiet dappled light of the ancient stone structure of Holy Trinity Church offers the luxury to contemplate, recalibrate and relocate for ourselves what it means to be human and the enduring nature of the divine.

I cannot decide if this is linguistic eloquence or verbal gobbledegook. Yet in this foreboding new world of Artificial Intelligence, social breakdown and celebrated immorality, an old church building bespeaks a calm and timelessness which our fetid and fermenting times cannot offer. I already dislike this century very much, and dread to think what other horrors and abominations it has in store. Deus Vorax translates 'The Voracious or Hungry God'. The computer systems and false gods of modernity are hungry and have insatiable appetites for electricity and data, but the true God of heaven hungers for nothing. Rather it is we who hunger for Him, for the meaning, and hope, and peace which He offers.

If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Psalm 50:12