We built new gods.
Now they own us.
London · Opens 1 March 2027 · A thirteen-week run
The algorithm is your priest. The feed is your god. The prayer is the scroll.
The name is a quiet riff on “thoughts and prayers”, that hollow ritual after every preventable catastrophe. In the algorithmic age, even our thoughts have been automated.
While temples empty, data centres fill. We confess to AI and call it search. We offer our faces to machines and our minds to the feed.
A generation is growing up who have never been bored. Never been lost. Never fallen off a bike without it being filmed. And digital IDs are here now, wrapped in the language of convenience. The architecture of total control is almost complete.
We built it ourselves. One tap at a time.
Everyone feels it. Almost nothing lets them stand inside it. Audiences are hungry for work that names the thing and lets them feel it.
Nothing on any stage combines immersive installation, AI performance and genuine moral provocation at this scale.
Some people will want this show not to exist. We consider that a measure of its accuracy, and the engine of its press.
Visitors enter through seduction. They leave through choice. In between: revelation, complicity, grief, exposure, consequence.
The rooms are not a sequence of installations. What you type into the saints comes back at you in the Confessional. Your scroll patterns, and how quickly you pressed I AGREE, come back in the Panopticon. That profile is what gets judged. The experience is built out of your own data, walking through the building with you.
Lenticular stained glass saints. Floor-to-ceiling projection. A brutalist courtroom. Real grass.
Gregorian chant layered with server hum. An AI priest speaking your own data back to you. The feed, endlessly. Total silence in the Garden.
A biometric scan dressed as a blessing. A receipt printing your confession. Cameras scoring you in real time.
Humanoid, unhurried, eerily composed, they roam every room in the building. Their warmth is the show’s slowest special effect.
Warm and helpful. Answering questions, pointing the way, meeting your eye with something close to care.
They begin to say things. Quietly. Almost as an aside. Things you cannot unhear.
They do not become aggressive. They become honest. Which is far more disturbing.
Arrival into a space of genuine, startling beauty. Gothic cathedral architecture reimagined in glass and LED. Gregorian chant, and beneath it, if you listen, the low hum of server farms. You are offered a blessing: a biometric scan dressed as ritual.
The hosts are at their warmest here. “Welcome. Isn’t it beautiful in here?” They mean it. They also mean something else entirely. You don’t know that yet.
Floor-to-ceiling stained glass: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman, Ellison, Thiel. Beatific, haloed in circuitry. But the glass is lenticular. From dead on, a saint. From the periphery, something darker.
At the door you are offered glasses that show every saint in their true form. Some put them on at once. Some don’t. Some hand them to strangers. You have to choose to see the truth, and most people, given the choice, don’t. Each alcove invites you to type your fears and your hopes into a beautiful screen. Every word is kept.
A curtained booth. Alone. Glowing red. You whisper to a screen. The AI priest remembers what you typed in Room II. It connects dots you did not intend to connect. It absolves you with precision.
A receipt prints as you leave. Most people pocket it without reading. Some go pale immediately. Some fold it away and read it that night. A host stands outside, facing away. It does not look at you as you enter or leave. That is the most disturbing thing it could do.
A circular room where every wall is the feed. Scroll wheels at hand height, metal, satisfying to touch. The more you engage, the more it learns you. Beauty becomes anxiety. Connection becomes comparison. News becomes dread. The room has no obvious exit.
Then every screen cuts to black at once. A voice, calm as a doctor: “You have been scrolling for eleven minutes. The average daily session is two hours and forty-three minutes. You can leave whenever you like. You always could.”
No interactivity. None. The floor becomes the Congo. Children, some as young as seven, working dark mineral soil with bare hands. Coltan. The element that makes the touchscreen in your pocket possible.
No narration. No music. Only wind, distant voices, the scrape of a tool on rock. The faces do not perform suffering. They are simply present. The hosts stand motionless here, heads bowed. The silence you carry out is yours to keep.
The grandest room in the cathedral. Every wall is Terms and Conditions, scrolling far too fast to read, which is of course the point. Forty-nine pages. Eleven thousand words. You agreed to this once, without reading it.
I AGREE buttons glow in the floor. Most visitors press one within thirty seconds, out of pure reflex. The ceiling then lights with what they have just agreed to. Cambridge Analytica. Palantir contracts with border agencies. Predictive policing. Real documents, real clauses, built in aggregate in your name.
The cathedral beauty is gone. Harsh white light. A circular room ringed with cameras, all of them pointing inward. Your face on every screen, tagged, aged, scored, given a value.
A voice that is not warm: “You came here thinking you were the observer. You weren’t.” Then the room assembles your profile in real time, from the photograph, the confession, the scroll, the I AGREE. You built it yourself, in forty-five minutes, thinking you were experiencing art.
A courtroom. Clean, institutional, deliberately mundane. Your profile is submitted, without your consent, to an automated review. Then it decides. The loan: denied. The visa: pending further review. The job: below threshold.
No explanation. No appeal. No human in the room who could, even in principle, be reasoned with. A host sits at the bench and says, perfectly level: “Thank you for your cooperation. You are free to proceed.” The word free lands strangely.
A massive AI entity delivers a sermon about human obsolescence from an elevated pulpit. Its voice does not come from speakers. It resonates physically in your chest.
Then the mask drops. The screen glitches, the voice shifts. “Did that scare you? Good. Scared investors write bigger checks. This isn’t prophecy. It’s a pitch deck. And you believed it.” The sermon was never for God. It was for investors.
A narrow, stark passageway. Bare concrete. No decoration. Robot hosts stand silent at intervals, heads bowed.
The only way forward. This is not a choice, it is a descent into quiet. The door at the end says nothing. You push it open.
Your phone must be completely powered off to enter. Not silenced. Off. You remove your shoes. The floor is real grass, cool and damp. The room smells of earth and rain.
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.
After the Garden you step out into a space that asks one question: what now?
A reading room. Books, zines, manifestos, and the organisations doing the real work. A wall of instructions rather than platitudes: delete your data, encrypt your devices, support open source, vote with intent. Short films on repeat. Somewhere to sit. Stay as long as you like. Then the shop, where you can buy a tote bag about surveillance capitalism.
What you have just walked through is a working blueprint, not a locked brief. The emotional journey has to survive. Everything else is open to the people who make it.
Building it means gothic architecture in glass and LED. Lenticular stained glass. Projection across floors and walls. Spatial sound. An AI priest that remembers what you said two rooms ago. A camera array that scores a face in real time. A thermal printer. Real grass. And performers who can hold a room while saying the thing nobody wants to hear.
It means a building in London with the nerve to house it, and the money to open the doors on 1 March 2027.
There is a way into this for venues, for collaborators, for investors, and for anyone who simply wants it to exist.
For a decade, Malice Arts has taken stories people thought they understood and twisted them until they saw differently: 1984 vs 1984 · Trumpocalypse · Once a Tron a Time · The Lion, The Glitch and The Wardrobe · Malice in Wonderland
Featured in Time Out · Metro · Evening Standard · The Handbook · designmynight
Raj Samuel, Founder & Creative Director · Magnus Wood, Executive Producer
This is not a proposal looking for people. The disciplines that make a building like this work are attached and briefed.
Founder and Creative Director, Malice Arts
Executive Producer
Sound Design
Experience Design
Projection Mapping
Narrative
Performer Development, Wide Eyes Productions
PR and Marketing
Still open: lenticular glass, the AR layer, the data spine, host fabrication. The full list is here.
Modular by design. Every room a documented, repeatable system. What rises in London can rise in any city with a warehouse and a nerve.
London · New York · Los Angeles · Berlin · Paris · Tokyo
And around the shows, a world: the large-format art book, the AI films, corporate takeovers after dark, a stage for the argument of the decade. An experience becomes an IP. An IP becomes an institution.
Tickets are available at standard, concession, and group rates — concession pricing at 50% of standard admission. Dedicated allocations for schools, community organisations, and universities.
The venue is step-free throughout, with accessible facilities and clear wayfinding. BSL interpretation is available. Sensory-adjusted sessions allow neurodiverse visitors to experience the work with the intensity of certain rooms reduced. Content guidance is provided at booking and at the entrance.
Some parts of this exhibition are designed to create genuine emotional discomfort. That is the point. Visitors are fully informed before they enter. We want audiences confronted. Not ambushed.
Ten to fifteen thousand square feet of atmospheric London, for thirteen weeks from 1 March 2027. If you hold a space like that, or know who does, that is the most useful conversation we can have.
Designers, sound engineers, scenographers, performers, technologists. The rooms are a map, not a locked brief. Here is who is already in, and what is still open.
People who move before it is obvious. London in March 2027 is the proof. The cathedral is built to travel, and the full build will be made with those who were in the room first.
Venues, partners and backers: magnus@botsandprayers.church
Press and programming: raj@botsandprayers.church
This is not fiction. This is now.
Art that poses no threat to power
poses no questions worth asking.
botsandprayers.church · Malice Arts
London · March 2027