The Vinyl Church is an immersive, interactive, community-based installation in Lancaster, PA. Located at the experimental art studio, Modern Art, and composed of thousands of long playing records and a boutique sound system, the Vinyl Church welcomes all to experience the vibrations of our mechanical surround. As the public-facing home for season 1 of Machines in Between, the Vinyl Church further models the future of public humanities.
Consisting of an extensive archive of wall-to-wall records, a perfectly calibrated hi-fi system, a turntable altar, pews, candles, devotional notepads, and engraved pencils, the Vinyl Church is staffed with deacons who have undergone months of specialized training in post-secular critique. The Vinyl Church showcases and distills an essential truth of our present age—how our encounters with technology can serve to upend commonly held assumptions about the world, about ourselves, and about each other. Indeed, it is the express purpose of the Vinyl Church to stage a perpetual scene in which there is no difference between the religious and the secular.
The albums in the Vinyl Church are sampled over the course of the Machines in Between audio series. They have been chosen for their insistence upon a world elsewhere; chosen for their intensities, desperate demands, and surplus of feeling; chosen for their longing, gnashing, bending harmonies, and crawling on your knees wailing. These are records that speak of good and evil, of standing awestruck, of ghosts and talking spirits and UFOs, of working class liberation and racial justice, of chakras, healing energies, and apocalyptic endings.
When visitors enter, all are invited to select the album that speaks to them, and place it on turntable altar, sit in the pews and hear the vibrations of transcendence emanate from the machines surrounding them.
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In addition to regular weekly hours when all are welcome to drop in, the Vinyl Church hosted dozens of events and gatherings, ranging from experimental lectures by leading scholars of religion, musical performances, film screenings, poetry slams, photo shoots, programming for our community partners, deep listening hours, as well as grief counseling sessions and therapeutic gatherings for adults suffering from mental illness. These events have been exhilarating in the range and diversity of the participants. And they have been incredibly effective in connecting with the public and making connections across demographics.
Throughout it’s year-long installation, the Vinyl Church became a space where neighbors, visitors, friends, and strangers could gather, not only to listen and learn about the music and religious traditions represented in the albums, but also to listen and learn from each other. We are amazed at how it became a manifestation of a thoughtful community— all different kinds of people coming together, openly, for respite, conversation, reflection and (dare we say) enlightenment. It is an exampke of how participatory, socially-engaged art can break down barriers, allowing us to approach complex and often controversial topics in a manner that creates connection, conversation and hope.
"To enter into the Vinyl Church is to find yourself stepping into an underdiscovered room in which you have kept an unmanageable quantity of wonder, reverence, mystery, and joy. Go and be transformed!"
— Peter Coviello, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago
