In the book “The Disappearance of Rituals” philosopher and cultural theorist Byun-Chul Han states that ritual once created shared “symbolic perception” and “recognition,” while we now face an environment dominated by data and information that lacks symbolic force. Traditional rituals served as techniques for “making oneself at home in the world,” providing stability and duration to the human experience. Yet in our contemporary reality, the compulsion of production and performance has eroded these stabilizing structures, replacing them with an endless stream of updates and optimizations that resist closure and completion.
Throughout human history, rituals have served as fundamental techniques for creating social cohesion and cultural continuity. As symbolic acts, they represent and transmit the values and orders upon which communities are built. From ancient shamanic ceremonies to modern religious services, from rites of passage to cultural festivals, rituals have provided frameworks for understanding life’s transitions and establishing meaningful connections between individuals and their communities. However, as Han observes, our contemporary society is increasingly hostile to ritual forms, favoring instead the immediate, the inauthentic, and the individualistic.
This shift has profound implications for how we experience time, community, and meaning in our lives. While traditional rituals created what Han calls “timely dwelling” – spaces where time could be inhabited and made meaningful – our current technological systems tend to fragment time into an endless series of disconnected moments, each demanding immediate response and continuous production. To counteract this trend, the relationship between embodied ritual practices and consciousness, both human and machine, presents particularly fertile ground for exploration. As sociologist Roger Bartra demonstrates through his analysis of shamanic practices and the placebo effect in his book “Shamans and Robots”, rituals are not merely symbolic acts but have real, measurable impacts on human consciousness and physicality. They create what he calls “symbolic substitution systems” that bridge the gap between cultural symbols and neurochemical processes.
This insight raises intriguing questions for human-machine interaction: Could ritual practices serve as interfaces between human and artificial consciousness? While current AI systems process information through algorithms, they lack the embodied, symbolic understanding that ritual practices provide to human consciousness. By examining how rituals mediate between symbolic and biological systems in human experience, we might discover new approaches to creating meaningful interactions between human and machine consciousness. This becomes especially relevant as we develop increasingly sophisticated AI systems that attempt to replicate or augment human cognitive processes.
Conflux’s Rites of Decay edition will take place in and across the city of Rotterdam, starting on September 18 and stretching a full programme of performances, exhibitions and a club night until Sunday, September 21. Artists, performers, creative thinkers and you all are invited to dive into Rites of Decay together with us.
Our theme text was written in collaboration with Eric Parren, Associate Arts Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA), NYU Shanghai.