The Mechanical Oracle is a performative machine that combines digital technology, a shape-shifting black mirror, projected light and an immersive soundscape to create stories that invite us to consider how the future can be imagined.
The machine performs two contrasting acts, each approaching the imagination in a different way. The first act is surreal, illusionistic and abstract, generating a space in which viewers can reflect on the dogmas of progress. Enveloped by light, movement and sound, viewers experience an immersive, liminal space - one that encourages them to suspend certainty, follow their own associations and imagine what might lie ahead.
The second act shifts into a documentary register, bringing together practitioners whose work involves imagining, anticipating and preparing for possible futures. Their perspectives outline strategies for moving beyond our tendency to imagine the future beyond our own biases or fears. These draw the viewer into different modes of thought, building a more nuanced understanding of how we might anticipate and actively shape what comes next.
Taken together, the two acts engage different capacities of the imagination: the poetic opens a space for possibility and free association, while the interviews offer a more critical and informed framework for envisioning what has not yet happened. Together, they invite the viewer to move between intuitive speculation and deliberate reflection.
The installation originated in an interest in the phenomenon of a shape-shifting black liquid known as ‘ferrofluid’ - a magnetic oil that can be made to morph into semi-solid forms through the application of a magnetic field.
By creating a three-by-one-metre horizontal pool of ferrofluid, the material suggested a new kind of “screen” - one that called for its own mode of representation. The key discovery came when the oil was viewed in a darkened room. Its perfectly smooth black surface disappeared from sight, creating the illusion of a rectangular window cut into space - an opening to lean in and imagine.
Above the oil, a rear-projection screen hangs just beyond head height, receiving black-and-white imagery from a projector mounted at the apex of the installation. When viewers peer into the oil, they see this imagery reflected from the screen above. The distance between the two surfaces makes the reflection appear to float far beneath the floor, producing the disorientating sensation of looking over the edge of a cliff - or into the depthless interior of an enormous VR headset.
Beneath the oil, 180 rare-earth magnets rise and fall in synchronization, moving in a precisely timed dialogue with the projection above. Their magnetic fields draw the oil into three-dimensional words and patterns, bringing language into physical form before it recedes back into darkness.
As each performance unfolds, the viewer’s eye moves between words materializing in the foreground and spectral images suspended in the apparent distance. This involuntary switching of focus intensifies the sense of immersion, helping to draw the viewer into the imaginative space of each performance.
The combined effect recalls the ancient practice of scrying, in which reflective or translucent surfaces were observed for signs of future events. The installation borrows this historical framework not as a means of prophecy, but as a metaphor for the human impulse to search for meaning amid uncertainty and to imagine what lies ahead.
The first act operates in a poetic and associative register, using illusion, abstraction and sensory immersion to loosen familiar ways of thinking. Its performances move between climate crisis, technological rhetoric and the dogmas of progress, allowing meaning to emerge through the interaction of projected imagery, shifting oil and sound.
The mechanism first revealed its potential as a medium for futures-based storytelling through an adaptation of Jane Hirshfield’s poem Let Them Not Say. The poem anticipates future regrets about a changed climate from the vantage point of the present. Hirshfield’s words opened the Oracle to a form of time travel, inspiring subsequent pieces that approach the future from different directions.
Projected and reflected lights dance in time with this solo piece for piano, written and performed by Chilly Gonzales. An abstract intermission in which the light sculpts itself around the mounds of oil, which are in turn sculpted by the invisible lines of magnetic flux created by the magnets.
Speed Sickness takes its starting point from Wolfgang Sachs’s essay “Speed Limits,” published in the catalogue for “Speed-Visions of an Accelerated Age” at the Whitechapel Gallery. The essay questions the logic of using fossil fuels to accelerate progress in order to “save” time, when time itself cannot be saved. The viewer travels along an endless highway at breakneck speed as the sequence moves between clarity and motion sickness.
Draw a line between two points on a graph then extend it forward, and it creates a predictive path into the future. The line might waver at times, but stand back far enough, and the general shape becomes clearer to see.
The line of the Great Acceleration represents the shape of 20th century progress. Notable for the sharp curve upwards at the end, it maps the industrial revolution and its consequences - from population growth to energy consumption, or in this sequence, the rise of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
The line embodies human progress, as its extension predicts our downfall. It marks a tipping point in time when the march of human progress needs balancing in order to keep our forward facing momentum.
Kenta Gamba is the slack-line performer and the music is by Cato.
Recited by a synthetic voice and delivered by a digitally generated face, this implausible mission statement promises an impossible future where technology makes everything smarter, simpler, faster.
By reciting the rhetoric of Silicon Valley corporate tech, the robotic face delivers a string of familiar aspirational claims, wrapped in an overblown promise that feels both shallow and profound.
This act is still a work in progress, but the current interviewees include an Afrofuturist, a neuroscientist, a futures design strategist and a technology researcher. Their responses help explain how our ability to imagine the future is conditioned - and often constrained by past experience. The interviewees consider why it is so difficult to conceive of futures beyond what we already know, while offering strategies for extending the imagination beyond the boundaries of the familiar.
In the second act, four futures thinkers approach a shared set of questions from distinct disciplinary perspectives. Comparative cross-cutting places their responses in dialogue, revealing both common ground and productive tensions that deepen our understanding of the questions being asked.
Taken as a whole, the dramaturgy of the Mechanical Oracle moves from the pressures of the present towards a more open proposition about what might come next. The performances are critical, informational, evocative and, at times, nostalgic. Together, they ask viewers to consider how dominant images of the future are produced, whose interests they serve, and what other futures might become possible if familiar assumptions could be temporarily suspended.
