Oracle Machines Exhibition Opening - Computer Arts Society

Wednesday 21^st October 2026, 18:00
BCS Moorgate, London / Zoom

About the Exhibition

Oracle Machines is an exhibition curated by Geoff Davis 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 Host

Geoff Davis

CASCOM

Geoff Davis is a pioneering generative artist, writer and AI researcher who founded Micro Arts Group in London in 1984, distributing computer art and story generators on data cassettes and Prestel Teletext. Exhibited internationally since 1985, and held in collections including Computer Arts Archive, Francisco Carolinum Museum Linz, Art-Science Franke Foundation Berlin, The National Museum of Computing and Le Random. PEN-published fiction writer and musician, Davis taught at art colleges, and worked in innovation and sustainability. He researched text/AI at University of the Arts London and Electronic Arts at Middlesex University; he founded the AI Creative Anthology in 2023.