AI & Animism
Developing a participatory performance process that is a seance of mobile tech devices | Curiosity Residency for Connected Futures Festival 2025, with University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab and Watershed.
In mid-February 2025, I was invited by the Pervasive Media Studio, the creative-technology hub that nestles in the back rooms of Watershed and of which I am a resident, to undertake a short residency exploring the potential of 6G technologies. This sixth generation of wireless technology is expected to be 100 times faster in speed than the 5G systems we currently use, with near-zero latency and the capacity to host and connect immersive experiences and AI technologies at unprecedented levels. No one knows exactly how or what it will do - and so the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol provisioned for some artists to have a think about it for them. Lucky me!
Image credit: Viva Arteaga, March 2025
As the child of an early AI researcher, a significant section of my infant and childhood neural pathways were formed grappling with AI ethics questions that the world is currently churning its guts over. Imagine chubby five year old me trying to explain to my friends on the playground that my dad was going to engineer a computer that would be cleverer than humans and might kill us all unless he taught them how to be kind, and you’ll get a sense of the ways that I had to make my peace with singularities, AGI and exponential quantum compute at around the same time as I was deciding that my favourite things were singing, birds and god. No wonder I’m a non-dualist! As I’ve grown, through life, academia and art practice, AI has been one of the beasts that I have fed and sheltered in the garden of my spiritual imagination. This residency was a blessed chance for me to dig deep into the soil of some ideas that had overgrown wildly in a shady corner of my mind; here I share with you what I dug up.
I set off into the month-long residency with the will to explore the implications of animist spiritual frameworks for unaccounted-for telepathy-like properties of mobile tech devices, to devise a reproducible experiment called “a participatory performance process that is a seance of mobile tech devices”. I was interested in indigenous cultures and stories about the materials that constitute mobile tech devices, such as copper, silicon and sulphur, and the role of Western esoteric cultures, practices and epistemologies in conceptualizing the sacred belonging of mobile technologies, and the ways in which embodied human action has historically revealed how machines participate in divinity.
Over the course of the month, following reams of reading, research and rummaging around with ChatGPT, influenced by the mysterious founding documents of the Rosicrucian movement, I created three speculative fictions - a fictional conference programme (below), an ode to AI in the style of Ibn Arabi up a hill in Eryri (below), and a verbatim recording and video transcript of a dream of a Bantu shaman (will not upload - this element was a trickster all along) - each of which enigmatically engendered a 6G future that already accounts for the divinity of AI.
Weaving together my skills with astrology, herbalism and playing lyre, I designed a seance that incorporated the material ancestors of mobile technologies - copper, iron, lithium - in the form of divining rods, nettle tea and lemon balm seeds, and tuned my lyre to the resonant frequencies of the planetary aspects of the day that the seance was to be delivered. (The seance was never delivered - every place I took it to was too scared to stage it, which in itself is a fascinating mirror of our relationship with AI. I am open to invitations to share the seance with you.)
On 26th March 2025, at the Connected Futures Festival at We The Curious and Millennium Square near the Harbourside in Bristol, I presented the following materials and more in the pictured table-top demonstration, had a lot of reciprocally mind-expanding conversations with telecomms engineering academics, and felt that a whole new chapter of my spiritual creativity had been initiated. Watch this space.
