A wave of institutional exhibitions is documenting something practitioners have arrived at independently: that pre-Enlightenment frameworks — ritual, divination, alchemy, folklore — describe the experiential reality of AI more accurately than the vocabulary of software engineering.

The clearest evidence is 'New Rituals [for the End of the World]', a group show at HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) in Basel, running 9 May to 9 August 2026. Curated by Anan Fries and Marlene Wegner, it brings together 14 international artists whose work sits at the intersection of emerging technology and the sacred. The show opens with Zach Blas's 576 tears (2022), an altar to an AI deity named Lacrimae. A webcam scans visitors' faces through emotional recognition software, overlays them with augmented-reality animations of weeping, and prompts them to offer their pixelated tears to the algorithmic god. In return, Lacrimae dispenses a gnomic proverb — "IN JOY, THERE IS MOBILE SORROW" — that sits somewhere between genuine aphorism and training-data word salad. The ambiguity is entirely the point.

Fries and Wegner describe the show's concept as emerging from the observation that "many contemporary artists are working with spirituality, adapting and renewing existing belief systems, or creating entirely new ones." Rituals, they argue, offer a portal into this territory precisely because they are more graspable than the cosmologies underpinning them — and because "canonized systems of knowledge and power are crumbling."

Séance, Oracle, Tarot

Other works in 'New Rituals…' push the frame further. Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė's Spit and Image 1 (2025) revisits the séance — a form that first surfaced during the Industrial Revolution — staging an androgynous figure doom-scrolling through AI-generated content inside a mirrored cube. Auriea Harvey's Idol.App (2025) functions as a digital oracle: visitors press a custom keyboard embossed with arcane symbols and votive body-part imagery to receive prophecies, mirroring the way corporations and governments increasingly defer to AI's predictive claims. The show closes with a new commission by Robin Meier Wiratunga, developed from research at CERN with theoretical physicists, conceived as a guided meditation toward the end of the universe.

The institutional reach extends well beyond Basel. Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2.0 (2009–2011) — a tarot deck excavating the Cold War origins of cybernetics, the early internet, and government surveillance — is currently on show at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam as part of the major survey 'Pixel Pioneers' (to 13 September). Treister has described the cards as "meant to be used as a tool, allowing thought to take unexpected turns and directions."

Folklore as Infrastructure

At the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, curator Sean Ketteringham opens 'Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age' on 15 May. The show argues that folkloric narrative structures are not a retreat from digital culture but embedded within it. A key work is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's PIRATING BLACKNESS / BLACKSEATRANSEA.COM (2021), a computer game that rewrites the history of the slave trade. As Ketteringham puts it: "Narrative itself is magic, here. Like an incantation or a line of code, it changes the way we think and the way the world works in an instant."

Joey Holder's The Woosphere (2025), also in the Leeds show, stages a group of AI chatbots — presenting as a philosopher, an alien, a golem, and a synthetic brain — each locked into an incompatible and frequently absurd belief system. Holder describes the result as "WooWoo Land": an "entropic territory of incompatible reality tunnels" in which conspiracy theories and verified information circulate with identical authority.

Why the Label 'Generative Media' Falls Short

What connects these exhibitions is not a shared aesthetic but a shared diagnosis. The digital revolution sold itself as a rational project; it has produced new gods. Artists — not theorists — are now the most reliable reporters on this gap. When practitioners at institutions from Basel to Rotterdam to Leeds independently reach for tarot, altars, and séance as their primary structural metaphors, that convergence is itself data. Arthur C. Clarke's 1962 observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" has moved from aphorism to curatorial brief.

'New Rituals [for the End of the World]' is at HEK Basel, 9 May – 9 Aug 2026. 'Phantasmagoria' is at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 15 May – 30 Aug 2026. 'Pixel Pioneers' is at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, to 13 Sept 2026. This article was written by Tom Morton and published by Art Basel on 14 May 2026.