The Oracle: Ritual for the Future
– Ars Electronica 2025
Victorine van Alphen / Brave New Human (NL), IDlab (NL)
The Oracle is a futuristic immersive performance-ritual that explores the deep entanglement between human beings, technology, and (AI-generated) image culture. It invites and encloses eight participants into an intimate 360-degree screen environment.
The screens function as agents and mirrors-reflecting and reshaping our perceptions of self, body, and an elusive “humanness.” Participants are guided by a live droid performer and a drone companion through a symbolic, interactive journey that blends ritual, performance, confrontation, and immersive installation into a single living system.
Participants shift between moral choice and passive absorption, navigating a choreography that is as much social as it is audiovisual.
They must negotiate moments of peer censorship, physical ritual, and shared decision-making, positioning themselves within the unfolding nar-rative. While technology takes a central role, the experience remains deeply personal, confront-ing visitors with moments of vulnerability, intimacy, and catharsis.
At its heart, The Oracle is not a spectacle of technology, but a reflection on it. Drawing from Buddhist and Indige-nous Latin American philos-ophies, it questions the Western ideal of the auton-omous human, proposing instead a view of the self as fluid, formed and reformed through systems larger than us. Not “another AI show,” but a ritual of collective experiencing: confronting danger, while seducing with the non-human. Symbolic, embodied, and emotionally resonant.
Reference
https://victorinevanalphen.nl/the-oracle-ritual-for-the-future-for-humans-and-non-humans/
https://see-nl.com/artikel/20251103-the-oracle-ritual-for-the-future-for-humans-and-non-
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