“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Media technologies, like those of magic and ritual, bring us in communication with an unseen other, whether an AI assistant or the Oracle at Delphi. Fumes from the heart of the earth were said to invest mortal women with the voice of Apollo in ancient Delphi. In older legends, spirits of the Earth itself lived below Delphi, sending messages unbound by any order of the Olympian gods or the Greek city-states. What voices speak far beneath the bright, noisy, corporate-controlled surfaces of our modern oracles on the Web?

Below Delphi invokes the ancient spirits that precede civilization, in the technological frame of a crowd-sourced oracle: you will communicate yourself to the oracle, and the oracle will speak uniquely to you. Since this is the world wide web, not a cave in Greece (if you are in a cave in Greece that is wonderful, though signal bandwidth might be limited) – and since the oracle is not visibly a Pythian priest (though Helen Erasmus has many forms, and that could be one of them) – you will hear Her words and music in the form of a podcast. Likewise, you will communicate with Her through your responses to a variety of evocative (and potentially confusing) questions.

Each podcast that drops will have a distinct theme and message, so there will be elements in common between what you hear and what others do. Each listener’s experience will also be quite different. That includes repeat visits – because you are not the same, your questions are different, the world itself has changed every time you return. The goal is to give you a new way to interact with narrative and music, in which you collaborate as editor and producer – from behind a dark curtain.

Bridging the worlds of technology, magic, and play, Below Delphi will remove the human-computer interface from the carefully regulated domain of commerce and surveillance, into an anarchic space that connects participants with a fragment of the divine that is simultaneously real and artificial, personal and communal.