As it has been widely practiced in ancient Chinese and Greek traditions, obtaining oracles through games played by many — or sometimes by one alone — has a long history. In recent times, the Ouija board stands as a remnant of this practice. Whatever text emerges from it, for those who need an oracle, it is an oracle — and the responsibility of interpretation lies with the one who reads it. It may be seen as a manifestation of the collective unconscious.
"Oracle Boards" is a web application that realizes on the internet the concept of Collective Instrument, a project I have been working on for a long time.
Collective Instrument traces back to an idea by Walter Smetak: rather than one person handling one instrument, many people handle a single instrument together. It realizes collectivity in music at the level of the instrument's interface.
"Oracle Boards" is an attempt to create an instrument — a poetry-generating machine — that produces oracles: fragments of language, phoneme by phoneme, through chance. Anyone can touch this machine at any time, but what matters is that you may not be alone. Someone on the other side of the web may be playing it too. The boards are synchronised. Yet the basic condition for each person may differ, because the ball moves differently for each. Even after you stop, this machine continues to give oracles — until the next person connects. Or perhaps no one will ever hear it again.