Artists Are Turning to Folklore to Make Sense of Technology
Observer ·
Myth and ritual have always helped humans navigate change, and contemporary sculptors are increasingly drawing on both to interrogate digital life and technologies like A.I. Rather than retreating into nostalgia, they treat the past as raw material for imagining what comes next.
Rituals have always been a part of human culture, evolving with both time and technology. Sometimes that evolution is fraught, and the inherent tension between familiar patterns of being and the speculative spaces of technology was at the core of “Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age,” a now-closed group show at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds that explored what technology reveals about folk rituals through the lens of sculpture. According to curator Sean Ketteringham , there are questions about history wrapped up in new technologies, and he “found that some of the most urgent statements on this topic were being made by artists working with digital media.”
It’s through this prism that the artist Nina Davies explores the changing nature of dance and movement, reframing TikTok dances as folk choreography in the video work Precursing (2023), which sees bodies shift from flesh-and-blood to polygons, their staccato movements shown alongside the narration of a fictional podcast. Meanwhile, some things stay the same. Mimicry was a foundational and sacred element of ancient dance, serving as a way to honor gods and nature—in her Image Syncers (2025), a fictional group breaks into a building by mimicking the movements of A.I. in order to hide their identities.
The historic—whether in centuries-old folklore or traditions or something as analog as technology from decades ago—often gets a new lease on life as technology pushes forward. A nostalgia can take hold, something that Ketteringham was conscious of in the curation of “Phantasmagoria.” Throughout, the eye that was cast on the past was one that seemed as curious and critical as those that were trained onto the possible futures of new technology and artificial intelligence. “I think sometimes folklore is conceived as a turn away from contemporary culture,” he said. “It’s like a return or moving backwards.”
Take, for example, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley ’s PIRATING BLACKNESS?BLACKTRANSSEA.COM (2021), a site-specific video game installation that situates users in a model of a boat, while uncanny narratives of the slave trade play out on screen. There’s a deliberate glitch in Brathwaite-Shirley’s story, making it so players can’t drown in the game. They become trapped instead in some liminal space, and something takes hold, infecting them and the ship. It’s an approach found throughout “Phantasmagoria” and in other contemporary interventions that engage specifically with the question of physical materiality, and what it reveals about a world that has become increasingly digital.
For Ketteringham, the exhibition was about “the digital and the sculptural intermingling,” and with it, the past and present, with the possibilities of technology presenting the idea that “sculpture can become immaterial.” Joey Holder ’s retrofuturist The Woosphere (2025) was inhabited by a fictional alien intelligence, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the figure of the Golem from Jewish folklore, all in conversation with one another. Isaac Lythgoe’s Why can’t we remember the future? (2023) exists more overtly at this intersection between temporal states—and between the physical materials of sculpture and digital modes of production. Even the piece’s title hints at the uncertain ways in which we relate to the past and linear time.
It’s tempting to read Lythgoe’s work as speculative evolution; Why can’t we remember the future? looms at two meters tall with carved wood high heels, carved walnut horns and carbon fiber wings. But for the creator, the distinction between the material and the technological is one of work compared to labor. The work is in the digital modeling and creation of an image, and “then I’m committing to hundreds of hours of labor to make it something real and physical,” he told Observer. The animalistic hybrids that Lythgoe brings into being are a way of understanding storytelling, how its references have changed over time, even as the ideas have stayed the same. Where before, folk tales of animals were used to explore ethics and philosophy, speculative fiction and the idea of the future turned these into stories about aliens and robots. “Instead of telling stories of the past for the future, we tell stories of the future for the present,” he said, describing his sculptures as having a desire to “hold on archically to some bit of the past.”
With technology developing at such a rapid speed, even the recent past can feel incredibly distant from the present day; Lythgoe’s sculptures, and work like Jürgen Baumann ’s emergency exit VI (2022)—the green running man on a building’s emergency exit sign presented on the threshold of ruins—hold onto the images and ideas of years gone by, not as a way of refusing the march of time or advancing years, but to keep a grip on the fragments of humanity that might get lost along the way.
In his 2025 touring exhibition, “Dig Me A Grave,” the artist Claye Bowler created sites of rest and burial, while recordings of Bowler singing traditional folk songs played in the exhibition space. His work concerned explicitly with rest—the piece Self Portrait in Bosiliack Barrow at Sunset, Cornwall (2024) had space for visitors to lie down across it—offers a different way of understanding the relationship between folklore and technology. Bowler is interested in what he describes as an “anti-archive,” folk songs that are understood through recordings and their changes, rather than through digital storage, and argues that one of the ways in which we understand folklore now is through the ways in which it’s open to interpretation. “There’s like a decided narrative of what was happening and what these ceremonies might have looked like but we don’t actually know anything about them,” he argued. It’s striking that Bowler sourced the various specimens of dirt and landscape that adorned the show through digital means. Nothing as advanced as A.I., but “I got all of those soils by using technology; some of those people are my friends but a lot of them I found through Instagram .” Some of it even came from a planter outside of the Henry Moore Institute.
These and other technological approaches to sculpture, even the ones most concerned with digital spaces that cannot exist in the material, physical realm, seem nonetheless animated by the fingerprint of humanity. As the artist Joe Moss put it, “we’re in a very specific time with the place that we’ve got to with digital culture, and that it’s quite a specific place that will be quickly forgotten.” When artists foreground ideas of materiality, of history—which Moss does, referencing the Roman tradition of making mosaics through pieces of older architecture—the shift toward a more digital world, and more digital art to accompany it, isn’t presented as an inevitability in the way that the hype around A.I. threatens, but as a possibility of what comes next instead. Particularly when art is given the power to steer it in new and unexpected ways.
What gives this developing interplay between speculative futures and a folkloric past its power is the ways in which it allows for historic narratives to be reframed while also casting a critical eye on what tomorrow might look like. “Tradition can be a real burden,” Ketteringham said. “It can be coded in a very socially conservative way, and I think we’ve got to handle that idea of tradition very carefully.” The past, then, isn’t past, but is still a malleable, living thing. Bowler’s approach to the archive and the ways in which a canon of historic songs can be repurposed around explicitly trans ideas of rest is just one example; “Dig Me a Grave” was animated by the idea that “someone else could be the one that is naming that narrative.” “Phantasmagoria” occupied a threshold—one aptly visualized by Baumann’s emergency exit—in which artists named both the past and the future in their attempts to make sense of the strange liminal moment that we all currently occupy.