Anan Fries on Ritual, Techno-Fascism, and Silicon Valley's AI Mythology
Artificial intelligence is often framed as a technological revolution, but its cultural impact extends far beyond questions of innovation or automation. Increasingly, AI intersects with religion, myth, ritual, and belief, revealing as much about human desires for certainty, meaning, and transcendence as it does about technological progress. For curator and artist Anan Fries, these developments are inseparable from the rise of techno-fascism, Silicon Valley ideology, and the growing concentration of power in the hands of a handful of technology companies.
Together with curator Marlene Wenger, Fries explores these questions in New Rituals for the End of the World at HEK Basel. Bringing together artists including Zach Blas, Auriea Harvey, Skawennati, S()fia Braga, Christiane Peschek, and Etsuko Ichihara, the exhibition examines how rituals continue to shape contemporary life—from AI companions and algorithmic belief systems to speculative forms of divination, digital spirituality, and resistance against Big Tech. Rather than treating ritual as a relic of the past, the exhibition proposes it as a framework for navigating an era defined by technological acceleration and political uncertainty.
In this conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, Anan Fries discusses why AI is increasingly mythologized, how Silicon Valley cultivates quasi-religious narratives around artificial general intelligence, why artists have limited agency within today’s technological infrastructures, and how ritual can become a means of reclaiming collective imagination in an age of techno-fascism, platform capitalism, and permanent crisis.
Anika Meier Anan, why does the exhibition New Rituals for the End of the World at HEK Basel focus on rituals? After all, it revolves around AI, AI doomerism, tech-bro culture, and Silicon Valley, all of which are shaped by a strongly solution-oriented mindset. Rituals, by contrast, seem to belong to an entirely different register, one that is more spiritual than technological. What drew you to bringing these two worlds together?
Anan Fries Rituals are a very practical proposal. For me, this idea of re-enchantment, a return to or renewed commitment to spiritual belief systems, is also a response to tech-broism, AI doomerism, and the technocratic power structures that have become increasingly dominant, especially since Trump’s second term. Although I work extensively with technology and genuinely value it, I felt a strong need to find a counterpoint to these developments. These systems of power are so hegemonic and overwhelming that they can easily become deeply discouraging. That is why I see spiritual or mystical belief systems as an interesting point of entry. Of course, they, too, can be instrumentalized by technocrats. At the same time, they offer a way to reclaim narratives and, with them, a degree of interpretive agency over how we understand the world, the beliefs we hold, and the kinds of social and political orders we imagine.
AM You mentioned that you enjoy working with technology. At the same time, many artists are criticized for using AI, while others create works with these very technologies in order to critique them. Do you ever feel caught in that tension yourself? Does working with AI create a conflict between your artistic practice and your critical perspective, or do you see those two positions as mutually reinforcing?
AF I can probably answer that better through another technology. In 2021, I made a work using virtual reality with a Meta headset. Coming from a theater background, I found working with VR incredibly inspiring. It opened up new possibilities for world-building. Of course, artists had been doing that long before me, so there was nothing novel about the medium itself. But for me, it was an exciting experience to create immersive worlds technologically and make them immediately tangible for an audience. At the time, I was deeply engaged with xenofeminist thought and, more broadly, with the emancipatory potential of technology. VR felt like a medium through which I could explore those ideas and articulate them in a compelling way. It was creatively liberating.
Fast forward to Trump’s second term and the increasingly visible alliance between him and the major tech CEOs. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, seemed to undergo a striking transformation, shifting from the image of a liberal tech nerd to a masculinist…
AM That was around the time Zuckerberg started talking about the need for more “masculine energy” in corporate culture.
AF Mark Zuckerberg embraced a misogynistic vision in which corporate culture should become more masculine. He adopted this hyper-bro persona, someone who seemed more interested in talking about the cattle he raises on his farm so he can eat them later than anything else. Watching that transformation, and especially his embrace of the idea that his platforms needed more “free speech,” was deeply disillusioning for me. I know that sounds naïve. In hindsight, he may always have been that kind of entrepreneur, but he presented himself differently. It was that version of him, that mask, under which I engaged with his technology.
More recently, I wanted to start another virtual reality project using the Meta Quest 3 headset. But I realized I simply couldn’t bring myself to use that hardware anymore. To me, it feels completely tainted. It’s not just about AI or which AI tools we choose to use, even though that debate is understandably central in the art world right now. The same problem exists across many technologies. We don’t shape the underlying protocols, and as artists working with these systems, we have very little agency. As Mat Dryhurst argues, unless you’re working upstream, at the level where these technologies are actually built and governed, you have very little power to influence them. That’s not how I work, and under those conditions, engaging with these technologies can feel profoundly disillusioning.
I’ve also used some problematic AI video generation tools in my work. If we’re speaking in terms of energy, you could say they’re karmic catastrophes. But I’ve used them because I wanted to understand how they work. I felt I needed to know how these systems operate from the inside. The real challenge, not just for artists but also for politics, institutions, and society more broadly, has always been to develop alternative tools and to explore different ways of working.
AM You’ve argued that we need to develop different tools and different ways of working with technology. Are there any people or projects that you think are already pointing in that direction?
AF Audrey Tang is an outstanding example of someone with a deeply reflective position who also develops genuinely practical proposals for how AI can be used. Tang argues that AI should be used to strengthen democracy while making space for disagreement rather than eliminating it. In that sense, AI becomes a communication tool that helps mediate between different communities and competing perspectives. Audrey Tang is a protocol artist because, as a policymaker, she doesn’t just theorize about AI. She develops concrete frameworks for using it to expand democratic participation rather than diminish it. That stands in stark contrast to the broader discourse around techno-fascism, which focuses on the ways AI is being deployed to erode democratic institutions. One example is Civic AI. It’s a democratic tool designed to help communities deliberate collectively about shared issues. The AI analyzes a wide range of viewpoints and identifies areas of overlap, proposing policy directions that reflect the broadest possible consensus. The goal is not to produce perfect agreement. Instead, it aims for outcomes that no one finds ideal but that as few people as possible find completely unacceptable.
AM We’ve already talked about AI doomerism and the broader sense of living through an era of apocalypse and crisis. But “the end of the world” can mean very different things, from an imminent technological collapse to a much longer historical horizon. When you conceived New Rituals for the End of the World, how literally did you understand that subtitle? What kind of “end of the world” are you referring to?
AF Marlene Wenger and I approached the idea of apocalypse as something cyclical rather than a singular event. It’s more like a rhythm. In her catalogue essay, Jenny Stümer even suggests that apocalypse can be understood as a kind of ritual, something that pulses through history again and again. We’re not suggesting that the world is ending more than it was thirty years ago. Rather, we’re responding to a particular zeitgeist. We are living through a moment shaped by profoundly apocalyptic phenomena: the climate crisis, the pandemic, and the violent conflicts and mass atrocities unfolding across the globe, which together fundamentally altered our realities and left many people traumatized. We bring these different developments together under the notion of an apocalyptic mood or sensibility. But that doesn’t mean we believe the world is ending in any absolute sense.
What’s equally important to us is the idea that apocalypse has never been a universal future event. For many peoples, particularly since colonization, apocalypse has already happened repeatedly. Entire worlds have been destroyed by other peoples and empires. We draw on a quote by Ailton Krenak, who argues that Indigenous peoples have lived with the experience of extinction for centuries, while it is only now that the imperial, colonizing world is beginning to confront its own vulnerability to extinction.
AM There seems to be a broader resurgence of interest in spirituality and re-enchantment. Why do you think this is happening now?
AF There are several reasons for this renewed interest in spirituality. One is captured by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Whenever a new technology becomes socially transformative, people tend to project magical thinking onto it. More broadly, I think human beings have always had a need for transcendence and spirituality. One book that was particularly important for our research was God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021) by Meghan O’Gieblyn. She argues that, after the Enlightenment, science and spirituality became separated into two distinct realms. She contends that the trauma of disenchantment resulted in a lack of intrinsic meaning for many.
AM So you’re suggesting that AI is simply the latest technology onto which these desires are being projected?
AF AI intensifies that dynamic because it remains so opaque. Large language models are essentially black boxes. Even the people developing them don’t fully understand how they arrive at every result. That uncertainty naturally invites magical thinking.
AM But isn’t that only part of the story? It also seems as though the AI industry actively cultivates this sense of mystery.
AF Companies like OpenAI deliberately mythologize AI. Sam Altman has repeatedly spoken about artificial general intelligence in almost transcendent terms, as though it were a higher form of intelligence. The race toward AGI is framed almost like the arrival of a godlike entity beyond ordinary human understanding. That’s also a marketing strategy. Audrey Tang makes a similar point. If your ambition is to build an all-in-one system that can do everything, it helps to present it as something more than just a tool. Tang argues for the opposite approach: many small, locally governed models designed for specific communities and purposes. Systems like ChatGPT, by contrast, are increasingly presented as companions rather than tools. To make that idea convincing, companies rely on a kind of contemporary animism. The technology is imagined as if it possesses agency, almost a spirit of its own, rather than being understood as software created by people.
AM You describe AI as something that is increasingly mythologized. At the same time, people have begun to relate to systems like ChatGPT in surprisingly intimate ways, asking them for advice, reassurance, or even existential guidance. Do you think AI is taking on functions that were once associated with religion?
AF That’s exactly what I find so fascinating about it: this oracular quality. Companies like Palantir actively draw on that idea in the way they market their products. Some of their systems are designed specifically for military applications, and they’re presented as tools that can predict and even prevent wars before they begin. The promise is that, by analyzing vast amounts of data, these systems can foresee outcomes and enable the United States, as the global superpower, to act before events unfold. It’s no coincidence that the company is called Palantir. The name comes from The Lord of the Rings, where the palantíri are seeing stones used to glimpse distant places and possible futures. The symbolism is very deliberate.
I understand why that vision is so compelling. I also recognize the desire for an oracle, for something that can simply tell you what is right and what is wrong. But I don’t feel that I have a belief system in my own life that can provide that kind of certainty. For me, the desire for spirituality is an expression of the absence of a belief system that I can genuinely believe in.
AM How did you approach the selection of artists for the exhibition? What connected these very different practices?
AF We approached ritual as a way of thinking about the relationship between technology and spirituality. Ritual has always been a way of embodying spiritual practice, of making it tangible through the body. At the same time, we felt that ritual is an accessible concept. Most people immediately have some understanding of what a ritual is, which made it a useful point of entry into these larger questions. Using ritual as our curatorial framework also gave us a great deal of freedom. Some artists bring actual rituals into the exhibition, while others engage with ritual in a much broader, more speculative sense.
AM Can you give an example of what you mean by a speculative ritual?
AF One example is Skawennati’s machinima TimeTraveller™ (2007-2014), a nine-part film created entirely in Second Life. It follows a Mohawk bounty hunter who travels through different historical moments using a science-fiction device: a pair of glasses that allows him to move through time. In one episode, he travels to an Aztec ritual and sacrifices himself. In another, he visits a future mega gathering for Indigenous peoples. What interested us is that the act of putting on the glasses and travelling through time becomes a speculative ritual in itself. It opens up a space for imagining both the end of worlds and the beginning of new ones.
AM Your own installation also proposes a speculative ritual, but in a much more literal sense. How does it work?
AF My work is a sculpture that functions like a shrine for smartphones. Visitors can place their own phone inside it, activating the sculpture. It then performs a speculative cleansing ritual, purifying the phone of what I call techno-fascist energies. There’s a sensor underneath the phone. As soon as it’s placed inside the shrine, a video begins playing in the vessels suspended from the sculpture. The ritual begins by “charging” the phone, or rather by summoning spirits. Those spirits are visualized using the stock market data of the four technology companies that are central to the work: Meta, Google, X and Nvidia. At the end of the video, the CEOs of those companies appear as praying deities before gradually melting away. That’s the culmination of the cleansing ritual. It’s speculative, of course, but it expresses a desire to dismantle the mythology surrounding these tech-bro figures.
AM Your work imagines a ritual that frees us from the power of Big Tech. Zach Blas, by contrast, asks visitors to offer something to an AI deity. How does his work expand the exhibition’s idea of ritual?
AF 576 Tears (2022-2026) was originally a web-based project, which Zach Blas adapted into a physical installation for the exhibition. The work uses facial recognition to detect one of six emotions from a visitor’s expression. Once an emotion has been identified, you’re invited to donate your tears to the AI deity Zach has created, Lacrimae. An augmented reality filter overlays tears onto your face, making it appear as though they are streaming down your cheeks. In that moment, you’re effectively offering your emotions to this AI deity. The work turns emotional labour into a kind of ritual offering, inviting visitors to reflect on the emotional relationships we increasingly form with technological systems.
AM If Zach Blas explores our desire to devote ourselves to an AI deity, Auriea Harvey seems to return to a much older form of divination.
AF Auriea Harvey’s work engages with the Bible as a kind of oracle. The installation is, in many ways, a very concrete ritual. Visitors interact with a custom-built keyboard that generates pieces of concrete poetry. Auriea Harvey programmed the system using an extensive database of biblical passages associated with different parts of the body. After a short while, the work prints out a personalized oracle for each visitor. In that sense, it stages an encounter with divination. The work speaks directly to our desire for an oracle, for prophecy, or for guidance from a higher authority.
AM We’ve talked about religion as a source of community, shared belief, and ritual. Today, many of those experiences have shifted online. How does the exhibition address the role of social media in shaping new forms of collective belief?
AF Alongside these works that draw on Christian imagery and ritual, there’s another group of works that looks at social media as a space where new forms of collective belief emerge. S()fia Braga’s work Platform Workshippers (2023-2025), for example, explores how social media algorithms can function almost like belief systems in their own right. Rather than simply distributing information, they shape the realities we inhabit, creating communities organised around shared narratives and reinforcing particular ways of seeing the world.
From there, the exhibition moves into works that are more speculative and rooted in science fiction. Artists such as Skawennati and Christiane Peschek are interested in world-building: how narratives and technologies can generate alternative realities and imaginaries. In that sense, the exhibition shifts from examining digital platforms as infrastructures of belief to asking how entirely different worlds, and different ways of living together, might be imagined.
AM What role does social media play in all of this?
AF There are the obvious examples—astrology accounts on TikTok, WitchTok, and similar communities—but then there are also phenomena like reality shifting. It emerged on TikTok, although there are YouTube videos about it with millions of views. It grew out of Harry Potter fandom but has since spread to many other fan communities. The idea is that you script your desired reality in great detail. By combining manifestation practices with a popular interpretation of quantum physics—the belief that all possible realities exist simultaneously—you can eventually “shift” into that alternate reality through the power of manifestation. It’s obviously a deeply escapist practice. But in a sense, that’s true of many belief systems. They provide a sense of meaning, coherence, or belonging that people feel is otherwise missing. And I think that’s precisely what makes them so compelling.
AM Rituals aren’t inherently liberating. They can also be used to reinforce existing systems of power.
AF One of the works in the exhibition that addresses this particularly well is Etsuko Ichihara’s Namahage in Tokyo (2017). The work reimagines a figure from Japanese folklore for the age of surveillance capitalism. Traditionally, the Namahage is a mythical being that watches over people’s behaviour. It reminded me of Saint Nicholas as I knew him growing up in Switzerland: a figure who keeps track of whether children have behaved well throughout the year before passing judgment. Ichihara updates that idea for the digital age. Her Namahage has access to databases, CCTV networks, and facial recognition technologies. It’s a technologically enhanced spiritual figure that serves to uphold a regime of surveillance and reinforce existing power structures.
So we’re certainly not suggesting that rituals are inherently benevolent or emancipatory. Rituals can be co-opted, corrupted, and instrumentalised just as easily as any other cultural practice. At the same time, we argue that rituals can create a moment of pause, an opportunity to readjust, to shift perspective, or to reaffirm a system of beliefs that one has consciously chosen rather than simply inherited.
AM After living with the exhibition and seeing how audiences responded, what has surprised you most?
AF What has been most encouraging for me is the response the exhibition has received. It confirmed something I had hoped but wasn’t sure of: people really do resonate with questions of spirituality and with the idea of ritual. There’s a well-known argument, for example in Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals, that rituals are disappearing altogether. It’s a deeply pessimistic view of contemporary culture, particularly of digital life. On the one hand, you have the techno-optimists who believe technology can solve everything. On the other, you have cultural pessimists who see digital media as little more than a story of loss and impoverishment. I don’t think either position is particularly helpful. What researching for the exhibition has shown me is that people are actively inventing new rituals and new spiritual practices, many of them mediated through digital technologies. Rather than disappearing, rituals are changing their form.