Oracular Interfaces: Divination and Magic as material for probing interactions with AI

Abstract

AI systems already sort, summarise, guide, approve, deny, and route people across institutions and services. House of IFs pushes that logic into a more explicit and absurd form to challenge whether they deserve the authority often granted to them. The project is an interactive installation centred on a web-based interface that generates a growing archive of AI-written omens from contemporary news. An agentic system (the "House") builds and maintains this archive of speculation, connects it to a shared memory system, and lets users query it through chat. By drawing on the protasis/apodosis (IF/THEN) structure of Mesopotamian omen tablets, the project parallels the correlative logic of large language models with a structured system of divinatory knowledge. The omens relied on the observation of terrestrial phenomena, which were interpreted as signs from non-human intelligences announcing future events. This textual corpus of knowledge contained the omens as well as interpretations and counter-omen (apotropaic) spells. The spells suggest a degree of agency in responding to the events. By "Oracular Interfaces", I mean interactive works which call into question the discursive authority of AI systems, drawing on the Latin etymology of orare: to speak or pray. The oracle can be both the future-oriented pronouncement and its source: the role of the oracle may fall either on the interface or on the one wielding it. Here, “oracular” is used to describe the assemblage of the LLM and its surrounding system. The interface is the seam through which the elements that perform textual knowledge are surfaced for interpretation and questioning. The work situates itself within a growing body of academic writing that uses magic as a framing for AI and computation. This project contributes by drawing specifically and metaphorically on divination as a historically situated, structured interpretive practice, with formal procedures and socially mediated acts of reading. The metaphor enables the work's contribution: to make strange the now too familiar epistemic presence of AI systems. House of IFs is presented through a web interface showing individual omens (Figure 1), a chronological archive (Figure 2), rearrangeable tablets and interpretation tools (Figure 3), and a semantic map of the archive (Figure 4). An e-ink artefact serves as a tangible controller (Figure 5). An agentic system crawls, connects, and interprets contemporary news into divinatory texts. Unusual events, or faits divers, are placed in relation to major headlines through correlative association (a 2:2 pair of matching sign and signified). The interface slows the reading of the omen by splitting the structure across “tablets” which hold the IF/THEN structure, the interpretation (exegesis), the sources and the counter-spell. Some tablets are initially concealed and are revealed when participants hover over them. At NordiCHI, participants will use the web interface and e-ink controller to browse, reveal, rearrange and interpret omens as a shared, tangible encounter. Participants may also propose omens based on their lived experiences. This aims to be a collective platform to question the role of knowledge systems in shaping and mediating our connection to events in the world. House of IFs uses the omen form and the semiotics of the interface to invite reflection on how AI systems fabricate authority and meaning, to challenge how these systems become persuasive and ubiquitous across the mundane and consequential.