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Oracle Machines Exhibition Opening

Title: Oracle Machines Exhibition Opening
Date: 21st October 2026, 18:00
Location: BCS Moorgate, London / Zoom

Part of the Oracle Machines Exhibition

Geoff Davis and David Link introduce Oracle Machines, a new CAS exhibition exploring humanity’s long search for answers from machines. The show brings together computer-generated text, poetry, AI art and contemporary digital practice, tracing a path from ancient oracles through ELIZA to some of today’s most talked-about AI systems.

AI Generated Summary

Video Recording

Geoff Davis and David Link explore Oracle Machines, an exhibition tracing relationships between text generation, artistic experimentation and the human search for answers. Davis introduces Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, showing how simple conversational responses encourage people to attribute understanding to computers. He revisits his Micro Arts story generators, distributed through microcomputer cassettes and Prestel, before discussing Link’s Poetry Machine. Link explains how the system gathers internet material, constructs semantic networks and generates associative language, aiming to surprise its programmer rather than imitate human writing. Its installation includes a keyboard that appears to type autonomously. The exhibition survey then considers contemporary approaches to poetry, blockchain, artificial intelligence and interpretation. Works by Sasha Stiles, Mario Klingemann, Ana Maria Caballero and Kalen Iwamoto investigate digital writing, aphorisms, translation, imagined artworks and cultural authority. Suzanne Treister’s diagrams and tarot systems connect technological and political networks, while Tivon Rice reworks architectural pattern languages through generated texts, models and sculptures. Auriea Harvey’s installation stages communication with gods through a keyboard interface. Davis concludes with his own work combining the I Ching, counselling phrases and science fiction within generative graphics. Throughout, the speakers distinguish meaningful interpretation from mechanical production, showing how audiences participate in making machines appear oracular.

AI Generated Summary

About the Talk

In this exhibition opening, Geoff Davis and David Link will talk about Oracle Machines, a new CAS exhibition exploring the long relationship between humans, machines and the desire to obtain answers. It brings together computer text generation and art, poetry, AI and contemporary digital practices, tracing a path from early experiments in machine-generated language to today's AI systems.

The impulse is older: the reading of bones, entrails and tea leaves, a book opened at random, the question or the prompt, put to something that cannot answer, but answers anyway.

Oracles do not have to be right, only open to interpretation. The answer is vague, so interpreting it correctly becomes the questioner’s responsibility. A prophecy that fails has been misread, not mistaken. AI systems enjoy much the same protection. When they invent an answer, we blame the prompt, not the oracle, and keep asking.

About the Exhibition

Oracle Machines is a 20 Print Exhibition with live artworks and video curated by Geoff Davis. It features work by Ana Maria Caballero, Geoff Davis, Auriea Harvey, Kalen Iwamoto, Mario Klingemann, David Link, Tivon Rice, Sasha Stiles, Ivona Tau, Suzanne Treister and Joseph Weizenbaum (ELIZA), alongside material documenting the history of oracles, the ELIZA chatbot, and current research. It will be on display at BCS Moorgate, London from 21st October 2026 until 8th December 2026. Entry is free for BCS members and their guests. An online version of the exhibition, with catalogue, will be made available on the CAS website a week before the opening.

About the Speakers

Geoff Davis

CASCOM, Artist, Speaker

Geoff Davis

Geoff Davis is a pioneering generative artist, writer, musician and AI researcher whose practice explores text, technology and creativity. He founded Micro Arts in London in 1984, creating and distributing computer art and story generators on data cassettes and Prestel Teletext network. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1985 and is held in collections including the Computer Arts Archive, Francisco Carolinum Museum, Franke Foundation, The National Museum of Computing and Le Random. A PEN-published fiction writer, he has also produced creativity software, worked in music, taught at universities and art colleges, and researched interfaces, AI and electronic art. He serves on the Computer Arts Society committee.

David Link

Speaker, Artist

David Link

Dr David Link is an artist, programmer and conceptualist whose practice explores the relationships between computation, language, machines and human thought. His work combines software, generative systems, media archaeology and philosophical research, often reconstructing forgotten or obsolete technologies to reveal their contemporary significance. His Poetry Machine, an autonomous text-generating system, was commissioned by and entered the permanent collection of ZKM, while his reconstruction of Christopher Strachey’s 1952 Love Letters programme received the British Computer Society’s Tony Sale Award. His installations have been exhibited at ZKM, dOCUMENTA(13), the Vienna Biennale, Centre Pompidou and numerous international institutions. His research focuses on algorithmic artefacts, generative literature and the archaeology of computation.