New Oracles- WIP 2026

sculptural wall installation with interactive video game

photoshop sketch

This project explores oracle and prophecy in connection with landscape, geology, and material knowledge and focusses on the player as oracle, who listens to a digitally created landscape and the rare earth minerals embedded in it. These minerals that form the hidden infrastructure of contemporary digital technology, store knowledge in matter, vibration, and mineral formations. Taking a posthuman feminist approach, the project moves away from human centered authorship and extractive modes of knowing and centers feminist intuition, embodied listening, and planetary wisdom. This project is still in development.

The project takes the form of a physical wall sculpture with integrated screen and controller that allows interactivity with a 3D digital environment. The wall sculpture will be made out of steel and transparent audio cables and ornaments, framing the vertical screen in the middle. Parts of the sculpture will be made of rebar, which I regard as the “skeleton of the Anthropocene” and regularly use in my sculptures. The transparent silverish audio cables are also a dominant material in my practice that I deprive of their original application and use to weave elements of my sculptures together. The digital environment combines digital landscape, UI interface, and poetic text. It consists of two connected scenes: a 3D circular menu space with 6 objects that function as portals to a second oracle landscape. The 6 objects stem from small ceramics that I made a while ago and whose shape I have translated into digital 3D models. Once the player selects one of these portals he will be taken into the oracle landscape to the location where the equivalent of the portal object is located. Within landscape the player can explore and interact with objects, that reveal poetic knowledge about the history of rare earth minerals and their essential role in contemporary digital technology. The user interface will give instructions on the gameplay and show a side bar with empty spots of stars that can be collected. When the player engages with a star object in the scene, a collected star will show up on the UI and this is also where the poetic text will show up.

Historically, oracles were sacred intermediaries, and often women, who communicated between human communities and divine or natural forces. Across cultures, oracular voices often emerged directly from the land itself, from caves, springs, stones, and fault lines. Contemporary feminist and eco critical theory reactivates these figures as alternatives to extractivist modernity. Rare earth elements and minerals are essential to contemporary computation, imaging, and communication technologies. Despite their centrality, they remain largely invisible, extracted from the ground and abstracted into circuits and screens. This project brings rare earth minerals back into perceptual and conceptual focus. Rather than approaching these materials as commodities, the project frames them as geological archives. Minerals store time, pressure, heat, and transformation. They embody temporal scales far larger than 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. Text appears in fragments, echoing the ambiguity of oracular speech. Poetic language emerges through interaction and proximity to objects, allowing meaning to remain open and interpretive.

After showing a really raw prototype at RIP space in Los Angeles in the beginning of December and getting great feedback from the visitors, I’ve been working on the concept and design of the project more. I will further deepen my research about oracles and rare earth minerals and get project feedback from the cohort and mentors on a conceptual level and then fully design and develop the game in Unity. I also will spend more time working on the design of the physical sculpture and build it out of steel, rebar, audio cables and found ornaments.