A triptych after Bosch. A title borrowed from Brautigan. And a surface that shifts over time. In this quietly dissonant work, the promise of harmony — between nature, machine, and mankind — is held up for scrutiny, and slowly, deliberately, begins to wrinkle.
The centre panel, echoing Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, is the key. At first, the human figures seem to revel in the same Edenic abandon — but they have been painted in thick oil, and will change as the years pass. The surface will distort. The forms will fold. Flesh will lose its ideal form. Time will leave its mark.
The title — taken from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 techno-pastoral poem, and later used in Adam Curtis’s 2011 critique of digital utopianism — is no accident. It reframes the triptych not as spiritual allegory, but as a modern fable. One where humanity is watched, preserved, and gently allowed to erode. Not judged. Not saved. Simply observed.
There is humour here, but also dread. Machines do not need to punish us. They only need to outlast us.
All Watched Over By Machines of Infinite Loving Grace asks whether the dream of being cared for by technology is, in fact, a kind of damnation — the final state of a species watched over, remembered, and quietly, inevitably, undone.
Exhibited: Play– The Frivolous and The Serious, Collectors Room Olbricht Foundation. 2013
