Under vexed conditions of knowledge and truth production, what some may call the deepfake condition, BAD PRIEST stages an encounter between the organic computational tools of the African diviner and the processed silicates of computation cultures that emerge from them. Combining research such as hand and vibe coding, social study, and sculpture, the interventions of BAD PRIEST take shape as an oracular application. Featuring a titular priest who attempts to manipulate and lie to you, the project unfolds across classes, public workshops, programmes, and a series of sculptures presented in 2027 alongside digital and physical theatre 

The project explores connections in mathematics, computation, and the long horizon of automation asking what might come ‘after transformers’. It draws on ethnomathematics, particularly the work of Paulus Gerdes and Ron Eglash, whose research traces mathematical knowledge embedded in African geometric and fractal design traditions and their relation to modern computing. BAD PRIEST also embraces ideas from critical AI studies, leaning on the work of Reza Negarestani and Nick Srnicek to consider the political economies of artificial intelligence.  

BAD PRIEST considers the modern ‘crisis of faith’ in the West and dramatizes modern hunger for spiritual authenticity. Activations of the app conjure digital performative spaces to explore the psycho-social impacts of the deepfake condition, such as social isolation, a reduction of all sociality to transaction, and other social crises of synthetic data. 

In the frame of Uncertain Intelligences