INITIALIZING
We Built New Gods. Now They Own Us.
A Cathedral to the Future · A Funeral for Our Freedom
Not a war. Not a vote. A slow, seductive handover. While temples empty, data centres fill. We confess to AI and call it a search. We let algorithms map our thoughts before we finish them.
No exhibition at this scale has confronted algorithmic control with this degree of artistic seriousness. Bots & Prayers is a large-scale, multi-room immersive experience — part theatre, part installation, part reckoning. Visitors move through darkly beautiful ritual spaces fusing live performance, interactive installations, projection mapping, spatial sound, and video.
Each room does what no documentary can: make you feel the system from the inside. Gothic architecture reimagined in glass and LED. Robot hosts who begin warm and become honest. A journey through seduction, complicity, grief, and — finally — choice.
The work uses its form to reinforce its argument. The architecture of surveillance is made visceral, immediate, and unavoidable. Visitors do not observe the system. They participate in it.
Visitors enter through seduction. They leave through choice. In between: revelation, complicity, grief, exposure, consequence. Each room is a station on a path that reveals how thoroughly the system has woven itself into the ordinary moments of being alive.
Arrival into a space of genuine, startling beauty. Gothic architecture reimagined in glass and LED. Gregorian chant layered with server hum. A "blessing": a biometric scan dressed as ritual. The robot hosts are at their warmest here.
SEDUCTIONFloor-to-ceiling stained glass portraits of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman — beatific, haloed in code. But the glass is lenticular: straight on, a saint; from the side, something darker. On your phone camera, the image shifts again.
REVELATIONAlone, in a booth glowing red. You whisper to a screen. The AI priest remembers what you typed in Room II. It connects dots you didn't intend to connect. A receipt prints as you leave. Most people pocket it without reading. Some go pale immediately.
INTIMACYA circular room where every wall is the feed — floor to ceiling, endlessly scrolling. Physical scroll wheels let visitors control it. Imperceptibly, the content shifts: beauty into anxiety, connection into comparison, news into dread. Then every screen cuts to black.
COMPULSIONNo interactivity. None. The floor becomes the Congo — children, seven years old, mining coltan with bare hands. The mineral inside the phone in your pocket. Their faces fill every wall. No narration. No music. The robot hosts stand motionless, heads bowed.
GRIEFTerms & Conditions scroll every wall at impossible speed. I AGREE buttons glow in the floor — most visitors press them within thirty seconds, out of reflex. Above them, on the ceiling: what they just agreed to. Cambridge Analytica. Palantir. Predictive policing contracts.
COMPLICITYHarsh light. A circular room ringed with cameras, all pointing inward. Your face on every screen — scored, sorted, valued in real time. A voice assembles your profile from everything that has happened since you arrived. "You came thinking you were the observer. You weren't."
EXPOSUREAn automated court, deliberately mundane. Your profile is submitted — without your consent, which is how these things work — to a black-box system. The loan: denied. The visa: pending review. The job application: below threshold. "Thank you for your cooperation. You are free to proceed."
CONSEQUENCEOne leads to a gift shop. One to a reading room: books, digital rights organisations, tools for resistance. A third is unmarked, narrow, and hard to find — it opens straight onto the street. "Your choice has been recorded. Thank you for visiting."
CHOICENot through any exit door. Your phone must be completely powered off to enter. Not silenced. Off. Real grass underfoot, cool and damp. One wooden pew. Candles. No screens, no projections, no sound design. The quietest room you have ever stood in. Some visitors stay two minutes. Some stay an hour. That choice — unlike every other in this building — is never recorded.
SANCTUARYExperience designer, cultural strategist, and founder of Malice Arts. A decade of immersive worlds that leave a mark.
It began with a pun. Malice in Wonderland: a beloved story turned inside out, familiar comfort curdled into something darkly unrecognisable. The name stuck. And so did the method.
For a decade, across ten events, Malice Arts brought thousands of participants through immersive worlds built on one question: what if we took something from culture — something people thought they understood — and twisted it until they saw it completely differently?
Every event fused music, performance, and set design into something that felt less like a party and more like a world. The Evening Standard, The Handbook, and Time Out followed. An 85% return rate — because transformative experiences leave a mark.
Bots & Prayers is the destination that decade was always travelling toward.
"The most important types of art are the ones that someone, somewhere, would prefer not to exist."
We are seeking Arts Council England support, co-producing venue partners, founding sponsors who stand in opposition to what this exhibition exposes, and creative collaborators who want to build something with genuine consequence.
If you want to be part of it, we want to hear from you.
London Premiere: September 2026 · 2027 and beyond — wherever the world needs waking up