As a pioneer of digital and interactive arts in the 1990s, I come from a tradition of developing disruptive, radical approaches to working with interactive technologies. When I started this work, the ephemeral nature of digital, virtual & networked technology was more in the hands of the users & makers, providing exciting new opportunities to make visible the invisible, initiate experiences of connectedness, magic, enchantment & play. Since the advancing corporatisation of the digital world, the assimilation of our real, visceral experiences into corporate, privatised spaces has been normalised, particularly in respect to AI, robotics, VR, automated systems – increasing polarisation & disconnection from each other, our environments, seasons & non-human nature.

‘Rituals and Robots’ pushes back, reflecting on the disruptive, imaginative and radical traditions of this past work & exploring new ways of making.

There has long been an argument that a commitment to technological progress will make the world more efficient and equitable. Meanwhile, we live in a world that for the last 30 years has increased deforestation and environmental degradation. We are witnessing unthinkable tipping points in the earth’s planetary systems and humans spend an increasing amount of time working, rather than the increased leisure time that automation continues to promise us. We spend our lives looking at screens, at videos and memes of other humans, birds, trees and cats whilst we yearn to connect with their real live counterparts. We spend increased time dealing with bureaucratic systems across our working, domestic and personal lives. We fill out forms in our search for love, but are increasingly lonely and alone. 

One of the threads of Rituals and Robots is to explore why humans (and non-humans) are inspired by seamful, clunky, playful, ineffable and uncertain experiences, whilst the reality of the seamless, efficient, potentially limitless and safe systems we use, appears to create a lack of meaning, poetry and deep connection, and increased mental health and cognitive issues. The idea of limitlessness based on materialism, consumption and market forces appears to create the opposite of freedom. Unsustainable in our world of finite resources.

This project is a defence of slow, clumsy, sustainable technologies – offering an alternative narrative to the deterministic notions of human and technological progress that focuses on seamlessness, growth and efficiency.

Rituals and Robots pushes back against the limitless vision of the tech corporations – for ever-more automation and extraction, humans becoming gods or cyborgs, super-intelligence and the singularity, and the drive to get the chosen few to Mars. I will be exploring how future technologies can be designed with reciprocity, to help us thrive, sustaining the eco-systems and planetary systems we are part of and need, to survive into the future.