the oracle has spoken
You are not youa performance on who is doing your thinking
The Oracle is a performance installation at BritCHI 2026. Sit, and your future is forecast — calmer, healthier, a move somewhere greener — and quietly generated by an AI. Each future it tells is added to the wall: a growing list of bland, mundane, ultimately identical somethings we take up in place of our own thinking.
The teller wears a robe, and a mask, and under the mask a machine.
the wall of futures
What the Oracle has promised
read them again. notice how little they differ.
what it's really about
Authorship psychosis
The Oracle is a parlour trick with a point. We increasingly hand our words and our thinking to a machine — our emails, our plans, our hopes — and then take back what it gives us as if we had thought it ourselves.
We call this authorship psychosis: the loosening of the boundary between the thoughts you have authored and the fluent output you merely prompted. It borrows from the old paradox of the ghost-writer, whose clients come, in good faith, to believe they thought the words themselves. Generative AI generalises that paradox and removes its friction. The more we delegate, the less the self is practised — and the harder it becomes to tell your own voice from the one written for you.
The futures on the wall are the demonstration. Ask a machine what your life should look like and it will answer, warmly and plausibly, with the same life it offers everyone else. Adopt it, and your future quietly regresses to the mean.
The more we adopt the thinking of the machine, the more you are not you. You're me.
The line is spoken by Hauser
in Total Recall (1990) —
a man confronted by the self he used to be, writing over the self he has become.
you are not you, you're me.