The Mechanical Oracle is a performing machine - a large-scale mechanized sculpture that stages a series of automated performances that consider how we might imagine and actively participate in shaping the future. Combining mechanical movement, sound and projected imagery, the performance unfolds through more than twenty choreographed sequences that immerse the senses. The experience unsettles expectations of how materials should behave, creating a sense of unease and curiosity that invites openness to unfamiliar ideas.
The machine plays a central role in the performance - a mechanical ‘master of ceremonies’, resplendent with the trappings of a finely engineered system. Motors whirr and lights blink in tight synchronicity as the apparatus enacts each sequence to an original score. The mechanized object presents as technologically elaborate, but its main feature - a layer of mirror-black oil, speaks to the arcane form of divination known as ‘scrying’, in which seers and fortune tellers gazed into reflective surfaces - as though looking into a space beyond the visible world.
The installation is organized around two horizontal planes: a rear-projection screen suspended above head height, and a ten-foot-wide pool of oil built into a table shaped structure, located at waist level. Standing between these two layers focuses attention - much as a stage and proscenium do for theatre. Viewed in a darkened room, the oil disappears completely from view, becoming a perfectly invisible mirror. Standing at the table’s edge and peering over, viewers experience the illusion of a void cut from space - as if peering into a giant VR headset. Focus shifts to what appears to be inside the liquid - where words, and faces (reflected from the screen above) appear to float below ground level, suspended in a phantasmic reality.
The most striking aspect of the Oracle’s performance occurs when the machine communicates through the medium of the oil. Known as ‘ferrofluid’, the oil has the ability to be sculpted into three dimensional words. Language rises in swelling forms, patterned by fetishistic spikes that glisten in the reflective light, interacting with the reflected images. Activated by a system of magnets, the words rise and fall - cascading into pools of shiny liquid.
Observing this phenomenon has a curiously mesmeric effect. The observer’s eye can’t help but oscillate between the far-field focus of the phantasmic imagery, and the near-field detail of the rising words. The rapid focus-switching generates a liminal state of mind - immersing the viewer’s attention in the unfolding dramaturgy. The overall effect is to produce a mildly hallucinatory state of mind - where the viewer becomes absorbed by the performances and interviews, giving rise to a dreamy state of imaginative speculation.
The Oracle’s performances are staged across two acts that total almost 90 minutes. The first explores the machine’s capacity for poetic expression - combining music, spoken word, animation, and projected imagery with performances by an actor, an acrobat, and an artificially generated persona.
Lasting between five and eight minutes, each mechanized sequence takes inspiration from a different source - a poem, an essay, a climate report, an absurd mission statement - and develops it into a performance that reframes the central idea through the expressive capabilities of the machine.
The Oracle sets the stage with Gogol - a prelude and opening sequence that provides viewers a moment to pause, settle into the space, and calibrate their attention. A piano score is synchronized with the movements of the shape-shifting oil. As the oil rises and falls, animated lines projected onto the screen above are reflected around the flexing contours, creating intricate patterns that draw viewers into a more contemplative state.
Music by Chilly Gonzalez
Let Them Not Say performs an interpretation of Jane Hirshfield’s poem of the same name, framing imagination as a means of accountability - inviting us to reconsider our present day actions through the eyes of future generations. The performer’s face rises from the infinite space below, represented as a moving mesh of intersecting lines. The smell of the oil and the emerging words bring a visceral interpretation to the poem.
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. Sachs questions the logic of using fossil fuels to accelerate progress in the name of “saving” time, when time itself cannot be stored or recovered. The Oracle translates this contradiction into an endless journey along a highway at breakneck speed, moving between moments of visual clarity and disorientation.
Music by Philip Glass
Chemical Vertigo follows an acrobat ascending a precarious slackline. As the camera pulls back, the line is revealed as a graph tracing rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, steepening toward an increasingly impossible incline. The sequence focuses closely on the physical effort of the performer: the movement of the feet, the tension of the body, and the increasingly labored sound of their breath. Through these intimate details, the machine becomes a vehicle for human vulnerability, giving an abstract measure of environmental change a felt human consequence.
Performed by Kenta Gamba, with music by Cato.
Think Different, Don’t Be Evil takes the form of a fictional tech-company mission statement assembled from the compressed promises of Silicon Valley slogans. Delivered by a synthetic voice with a digitally generated face, the sequence accumulates into an increasingly absurd catalogue of technological assurances. The humor gains traction as the absurdity mounts.
The second act shifts into a documentary register, moving from where we might be heading - to how we might imagine the future differently. The focus here is on how the imagination can be encouraged to think beyond the constraint of previous experiences. How might we draw on what we already know without allowing it to limit what we can imagine?
This act features interviews with four futures thinkers, cross-cutting between their responses to show where their ideas converge and diverge, inviting viewers to broaden their sense of what is possible. The interviewees include a leading Afrofurturist, a neuroscientist, a participatory futures design strategist, and a technology researcher. The Oracle poses each question one at a time, drawing each speaker up from the depths below.
The interviewees approach imagination as a source of hope, a skill that needs practice, and a process rooted in how the mind has evolved to anticipate what comes next. They explore how storytelling moves us beyond inherited images or slight variations of the present, making unfamiliar futures tangible enough to understand how we might play a role. They also explain how these possibilities are connected to identity and belonging - because seeing ourselves represented opens new ways of imagining who we might become.
As the questions progress, the speakers distinguish imagining from predicting, describing how curiosity and play can help us explore possible futures - while remaining open to the unsettling prospect of uncertainty. Together, they invite viewers to consider how stories influence our expectations of the future, and how our collective imaginations can be organized to help shape what comes next
