The Cambois Oracle

Premiere: ElectroPutere, Bucharest, Romania (Sept-Oct 2026).

A short film (13’10”) unpicking the ideologies of techno-optimism and Longtermism whilst creating a mythopoetic, intertextual resistance against plans to build an AI hyperscale data centre in the North East of England.

It is thought that the Delphic Oracle, also known as the Pythia (English: Pythoness), produced her sought-after prophetic visions after inhaling the fumes of ethylene that arose from fault lines beneath Apollo’s Temple; the same substance that is used to produce coolants to cool AI hyperscale data centres.

The allure of predictive technologies has endured across societies. The search for answers once outsourced to oracles who spoke in cryptic verse is now outsourced to LLM-using chatbots. Both conjured from a mystified source, both emerging from conditions of concealment, secrecy and coded language.

This film, shot in the North East of England, combines dance, ethnographic observation, fieldnotes and sound to create a mythopoetic, intertextual rebellion against plans to build a 110ft tall, 10-building data centre on the local coastline.

In this vision, the oracle’s underground temple is substituted for the cave and the board room which become symbolic of the spaces of power that need to include silenced voices in AI policymaking.

The fragments expressed by the three women’s voices critically unpick the sentiments and ideologies underpinning techno-optimism, Longtermism and Affective Altruism, and opaque power-hungry groups like Praxis Nation. These are then put in dialogue with plans for a new data centre and the known effects on the health of local populations, wildlife and the environment.

The soundscape is produced solely through vocals re-channelling the unmistakable hum of AI data centres. It riffs on meditation as a way to fuse the significance of the breath and trance in the oracle’s ritual with the changing air quality around data centres and the emissions comparable to a major airport. In order to voice resistance, we need to be able to breathe as a bare minimum. What does it mean when simple access to clean air is at stake?