New Oracles- WIP 2026
sculptural wall installation with interactive video game
![]()
photoshop sketch
NEW ORACLES explores oracle and prophecy in connection with landscape, geology, and material knowledge, positioning the player as an oracle who listens to a digitally created landscape and the rare earth minerals embedded in it. These minerals form the hidden infrastructure of contemporary digital technology and carry knowledge through matter, vibration, and geological formation. Taking a posthuman feminist approach, the project moves away from human centered authorship and extractive modes of knowing, and instead centers feminist intuition, embodied listening, and planetary wisdom. This project is still in development.
The project takes the form of a hybrid game installation. A vertical screen is embedded in a wall mounted sculpture made of steel, rebar, and cables, and ornaments, with an integrated controller. Rebar functions as a structural and symbolic material, referenced as the skeleton of the Anthropocene, while transparent audio cables are deprived of their original application and repurposed as connective and ornamental elements. The sculpture grounds the digital experience in physical infrastructure and material presence.
The digital environment combines digital landscape, UI interface, and poetic text. It is set in a flooded quarry, where the player moves through an extractivist, industrial environment. Navigation is structured through portals represented by silver organic floating shapes. These portals return the player to a circular 3D menu that functions as both interface and ritual monument. From there, the player enters different locations in the landscape, tied to specific portal forms. Within the quarry, floating stars can be collected. Interaction with these stars will reveal fragments of poetic and factual text about rare earth elements and their role in contemporary digital technologies, in relationship to geological layers and millennia of mineral storage.
Historically, oracles were intermediaries between human communities and natural or divine forces, often emerging directly from the land and frequently embodied by women. Contemporary feminist and ecocritical theory reactivates the oracle as an alternative to extractivist modernity. Rare earth minerals, while central to computation and communication, remain largely invisible and abstracted into circuits and screens. Rather than approaching these materials as commodities, the project reframes these materials as geological archives that store time, pressure, and transformation across temporal scales far exceeding human history and offer a nonhuman voice distinct from animal or machine intelligence. In this project, poetry operates as a primary method of translation between theory, landscape, and experience.
Following the presentation of an early prototype at RIP Space in Los Angeles, the project is currently in active development. Ongoing work focuses on deepening the research framework, refining the game structure and visual language in Unity, and further developing the sculptural installation as an integral part of the experience.
![]()
