Cyborg Rituals features an AI powered by a database of esoteric rituals from the two countries of origin of the performing artists. This AI generates a ritual in order to invoke a "higher digital entity".
Kris Hastings, a Norwegian artist, and Lola Rossi performed this ritual via videoconference, guided by the AI. During this immersive installation, aggressive and strange pop-up windows appear as fragmented apparitions around the audience.
Cyborg Rituals is an immersive installation and a webpage with a VR function, featuring a ceremony generated by artificial intelligence, performed via videoconference, simultaneously by Kris Hastings, a Norwegian artist, and Lola Rossi, a French artist.
During the installation, the audience is invited to sit in a dark room. Throughout the performance, projections appear on multiple levels above the viewer, like aggressive "pop-ups", intensifying as a "higher digital entity" is invoked.
The work questions whether these new forms of prefabricated and scripted communication could diminish our multiplicity or guide us towards previously unimaginable forms of communion or union. Through a critical analysis of the dynamics of human-machine interaction, this performance questions the evolving concept of control in the context of artificial intelligence: we seek its efficiency and guidance, while harboring an underlying fear of its ability to override human will.
The ritual is generated by an algorithm fed by a database of cultural rituals from the two artists' countries: Norwegian mythologies and 19th century French esoteric books. The AI, drawing on these diverse cultural roots, seeks not only to reproduce, but to transcend traditional rites that are a manifestation of the synergy between the tangible and the virtual.
The project is carried out with the support of the Center for the Arts of Enghien-les-Bains, a conventionally recognized Scene for Art and Creation, and the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.
