Hi! I'm The Rev. I'm here to collaborate with you on the ways you might employ Sacred Technologies as you navigate these times.
I do not practice, promote and/or ascribe to any religion or faith tradition but rather understand all of these lineages as r/evolutionary technologies, developed by humans since (y)our earliest manifestation as enfleshed kin on earth to support the collective discernment of emotional, spiritual, and ethical collaboration, and to ensure interdependent care and ecosystem survival.
Rituals — also practiced by some of our animal kin — are well documented as having profound impacts on our somatic well being and nervous system capacity. Both individual and collective bodies have relied on these technologies for thousands of years to withstand and address challenges of all scales, and they continue to be not only available in their traditional forms but for our collective reconsideration, redrafting, and speculative reimagining.
You can just call me The Rev — I use they/them pronouns. At the workstation I will ask what to call you, and what language to use for you. You do not have to answer either. Whatever you give me is used while we talk and is not written down.
Where this is running
On one Raspberry Pi 5 in the room at Ars Electronica. The model, the writing it draws on and the computation are all on that machine, and its ordinary operation does not need the Internet. Pull the network cable and the conversation carries on.
That is a deliberate limit rather than a shortage. There is a boundary around what this office covers, and it holds here the way it would for a person: medical, legal, immigration and financial advice, psychotherapy, substance-use treatment, crisis intervention beyond stabilisation, and care continued over months are all handed on rather than attempted. The FAQ says what runs, what is kept, what is not yet built, and where it stops.
If you are coming to Ars Electronica
You can contribute to your altar through the virtual offertory, which says what happens to what you give before you give it. The Rev itself never sees any of it — it has no eyes and no ears, and cannot read a file under any circumstances.
If you want to run one
The Rev is small, local and specific on purpose, and none of that is proprietary. If you are interested in hosting the Rev, or in running a version of it for your own community, contact us.
What it would take is a computer, an open-weights model, and a body of writing somebody chose on purpose. The last of those is the work. A cell begins empty and knows only what people have put into it.