No matter what, sooner or later religion will find its way into the topic of tattoo. In the past few years we’ve seen preachers who have tattoo artists set up at their religious services, Muslims who have angered other Muslims over their personal choice to be tattooed, Buddhists being tattooed with words of political protest against the Chinese…the list goes on and on. And, unless Hollywood has lied to me my entire life thus far – prisons are also filled with inmates covered in religious tattoos.
All of this being the case, San Jose, California based artist Chris Eckert has just created a functional work of art that intends to point out the ridiculous randomness of religious zealots who feel that they were born directly into religious certainty.
It’s called Auto Ink and what it is is a machine which randomly tattoos a religious symbol on to a person’s arm. Laying their arm inside the machine, the volunteer grabs on to a rubber grip and the machine then inks a religious symbol on to the volunteer’s forearm. I’m not too sure that a lot of people will be lining up to have this done, but that’s beside the point. Says inventor/artist Chris Eckert about it all:
‘”While my personal experience with religion is one of inclusion, a system that unites people from different regions and cultures, the public face of religion is often one of exclusion. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish zealots who know what God wants. More specifically they know what God doesn’t want and apparently God does not want me…or you. This public face of religion is always so certain, self-confident, even arrogant. That anyone could possibly know the “truth” when that truth is randomly assigned at birth is just funny.”’
An interesting statement indeed. Check out more on this, including a video of how it’s all done, here.