Ed Fornieles8 Ball Sages

8 Ball Sages is a new interactive digital work from contemporary, genre-bending artist Ed Fornieles. With an interdisciplinary approach born out of the shifting mesh of the still nascent digital age, Fornieles’ practice focuses on the way technology and the internet are reshaping our lived experience and the world around us.

Throughout his practice, Fornieles has explored identity and the interaction and blending of online and irl environments. He has examined the way digital platforms shape our real-world personas in projects like Dorm Daze and Animal House, blurred the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds in Modern Family, and anthropomorphized data sets in Finiliars, creating an emotional connection with vast, impersonal market structures through cute digital avatars.

8 Ball Sages continues these threads of exploration, examining our relationship with technology as it integrates itself further into our personal lives. The Sages themselves are a group of AI-driven, responsive, uniquely animated characters, imbued with the nostalgic inspiration of 80s Zoltan theme park fortune tellers and their namesake, the Magic 8 Ball, as well as the more contemporary trend of digital companions. The influence of the Tamagotchi of the 90s, Microsoft’s office assistant Clippy, Neopets, and even Fornieles’ own Finiliars are felt.

Divining the future and wrestling control from a chaotic universe has been a human preoccupation for millennia. While many of these beliefs began to fade as modern science blossomed, their underlying drivers and much of their symbolism remain embedded in modern culture. The Magic 8 Ball of the 1940s, deeply rooted in this tradition of mysticism and the occult, was directly inspired by spirit writing and clairvoyance. Through a child’s toy, people allowed themselves to safely access and play with the ideas of fate and fortune-telling without compromising their established worldview.

By giving an AI companion not just a face, but a discernible personality and fluctuating mood, Fornieles probes the nature of connection and interaction, looking into ‘a possible future where we have more intimate, realised relationships with these data sets that are cloaked in the facade of humanness.’

Our cultural lexicon is mined further by using the archetype of a sage and wrapping the project in the language of mysticism. Fornieles plays with ingrained ideas around knowledge and social dynamics, tapping into universal models of esoteric understanding and wisdom, building in a pre-established potential power dynamic to the relationship.

8 Ball Sages sees Fornieles engage with this ingrained search for meaning and understanding, drawing parallels between the practices of divination and fortune-telling of the past with the contemporary use of AI as a personal tool for guidance and knowledge. Seeing such intrinsically forward-facing digital work explore notions of potential futures through antiquated concepts and beliefs presents a fascinating dichotomy, inviting us to question our current reality and the role that technology plays in shaping it.