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LONDON PREMIERE: SEPTEMBER 2026

BOTS & PRAYERS

We Built New Gods. Now They Own Us.

A Cathedral to the Future  ·  A Funeral for Our Freedom

10 Immersive Rooms
85% Audience Return Rate
SCROLL

The quietest revolution
in human history.

Not a war. Not a vote. A slow, seductive handover. While temples empty, data centres fill. We confess to AI and call it a search. We let Google map our thoughts before we finish them.

We offer our faces to machines and our minds to the feed — and as we upload more of ourselves, a darker question rises: who now owns the soul of this world, and did we ever choose them?

A generation is growing up who have never been bored. Never been lost. Never fallen off a bike without it being filmed. The freedom to simply exist — formless, ungoverned — is being quietly deleted. Nobody asked if they wanted to trade it.

And now digital IDs are here, wrapped in the language of convenience. The architecture of total control is almost complete. We built it ourselves, one tap at a time.

4.9B
Social media users globally — more than half of humanity, inside the feed
2h 23m
Average daily time spent scrolling — per user, every day, without end
Zero
Major cultural exhibitions confronting algorithmic control at this scale. Until now.

Part theatre. Part installation.
Part reckoning.

A large-scale, multi-room immersive experience. Visitors move through darkly beautiful ritual spaces fusing live performance, interactive installations, projection mapping, spatial sound, and video. Each room does what no documentary can: make you feel the system from the inside.

Gothic Architecture

Cathedral spaces reimagined in glass, LED and shadow. The sacred aesthetic turned inside out — used to make you feel the religion of technology.

Robot Hosts

Humanoid guides — warm and helpful at first. As you move deeper, they begin to say things, quietly, that visitors cannot unhear. They don't become aggressive. They become honest.

Participatory Data

Every choice becomes data. Every interaction is part of the ritual. Visitors are not observers. They are participants in the very system being examined.

A Complete Journey

Ten rooms. Seduction first, revelation later, grief somewhere in the middle. At the end — a choice. One is the only thing in the building that is never recorded.

"Art that poses no threat to power poses no questions worth asking."
— Bots & Prayers

The Journey.
Ten rooms. One reckoning.

Visitors enter through seduction. They leave through choice. In between: revelation, complicity, grief, exposure, consequence. Each room is a station on a path that reveals how thoroughly the system has woven itself into the ordinary moments of being alive.

These rooms are a blueprint for artists, designers, sound engineers, and performers. We are inviting you to build them. To make them real. To make them unforgettable.

I–II Seduction Beauty before the truth
III–IV Intimacy Personal becomes data
V Grief The cost made visible
VI–VIII Exposure What it means to be known
IX–X Choice The only unrecorded moment
I

The Nave

Arrival into a space of genuine, startling beauty. Gothic architecture reimagined in glass and LED. Gregorian chant layered with server hum. A "blessing": a biometric scan dressed as ritual. The robot hosts are at their warmest here.

SEDUCTION
II

Saints of Silicon

Floor-to-ceiling stained glass portraits of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Altman — beatific, haloed in code. But the glass is lenticular: straight on, a saint; from the side, something darker. On your phone camera, the image shifts again.

REVELATION
III

The Confessional

Alone, in a booth glowing red. You whisper to a screen. The AI priest remembers what you typed in Room II. It connects dots you didn't intend to connect. A receipt prints as you leave. Most people pocket it without reading. Some go pale immediately.

INTIMACY
IV

The Doomscroll

A circular room where every wall is the feed — floor to ceiling, endlessly scrolling. Physical scroll wheels let visitors control it. Imperceptibly, the content shifts: beauty into anxiety, connection into comparison, news into dread. Then every screen cuts to black.

COMPULSION
V

The Field of Forgotten Hands

No interactivity. None. The floor becomes the Congo — children, seven years old, mining coltan with bare hands. The mineral inside the phone in your pocket. Their faces fill every wall. No narration. No music. The robot hosts stand motionless, heads bowed.

GRIEF
VI

The Hall of Agreement

Terms & Conditions scroll every wall at impossible speed. I AGREE buttons glow in the floor — most visitors press them within thirty seconds, out of reflex. Above them, on the ceiling: what they just agreed to. Cambridge Analytica. Palantir. Predictive policing contracts.

COMPLICITY
VII

The Panopticon

Harsh light. A circular room ringed with cameras, all pointing inward. Your face on every screen — scored, sorted, valued in real time. A voice assembles your profile from everything that has happened since you arrived. "You came thinking you were the observer. You weren't."

EXPOSURE
VIII

The Judgement Room

An automated court, deliberately mundane. Your profile is submitted — without your consent, which is how these things work — to a black-box system. The loan: denied. The visa: pending review. The job application: below threshold. "Thank you for your cooperation. You are free to proceed."

CONSEQUENCE
IX

The Exit — Three Doors

One leads to a gift shop. One to a reading room: books, digital rights organisations, tools for resistance. A third is unmarked, narrow, and hard to find — it opens straight onto the street. "Your choice has been recorded. Thank you for visiting."

CHOICE
X

The Garden

Not through any exit door. Your phone must be completely powered off to enter. Not silenced. Off. Real grass underfoot, cool and damp. One wooden pew. Candles. No screens, no projections, no sound design. The quietest room you have ever stood in. Some visitors stay two minutes. Some stay an hour. That choice — unlike every other in this building — is never recorded.

SANCTUARY

A decade of worlds
people couldn't forget.

10
Major Immersive Events
85%
Audience Return Rate
1000s
Participants Through Each World
3
Major Press Placements Per Event
Evening Standard · The Handbook · Time Out London

Previous Productions

1984 vs 1984 Put audiences inside Orwell's surveillance state. Asked: have we arrived?
Trumpocalypse Political horror turned live theatre.
Blizzard of Odd Dystopia wrapped in beauty and sound.
Once a Tron a Time Digital mythology rendered as ritual.
The Lion, The Glitch & The Wardrobe Childhood wonder fractured into something sharper and more honest.

Every event fused music, performance, and set design into something that felt less like a party and more like a world. An 85% return rate — because transformative experiences leave a mark.

Bots & Prayers is the destination that decade was always travelling toward.

The cultural conversation
no institution is having.

We are applying for Arts Council England support and seeking co-producing venues and founding sponsors — brands and organisations that stand in conscious opposition to what this exhibition exposes. Rooted in humanity, the natural world, and the earth. Not tech. Not convenience.

01

Arts Council England

Application in progress. Bots & Prayers meets every criterion for transformational cultural investment: ambitious scale, genuine public benefit, significant artistic vision, and measurable societal reach beyond the arts sector.

02

Co-Producing Venues

Seeking large-scale London venue partners for the September 2026 world premiere. The work requires space with presence — physical and cultural. A converted industrial hall, a major arts institution, a gothic civic building. The architecture should echo the themes.

03

Founding Sponsors

The contrast is the message. We want brands rooted in what the exhibition defends: the natural world, analogue craft, independent thinking, irreducible humanity. Their association with Bots & Prayers is itself a statement of values. The best sponsorship does not look like sponsorship.

04

Creative Collaborators

Installation artists, sound designers, scenographers, video artists, and performers who want to build something with genuine consequence. These rooms are a framework. The artists make them real. We are seeking the best in their fields.

Why Now

Digital ID rollout in the UK is accelerating. The public is beginning to notice what that means. The appetite for serious cultural engagement with this question has never been higher.

AI has moved from abstraction to daily life. The conversation is no longer theoretical. Everyone now has a personal relationship with these systems. The timing is precise.

Immersive experience is the fastest-growing sector in UK arts. Bots & Prayers is the work this medium was made for — one that uses its form to reinforce its argument.

No exhibition at this scale has confronted algorithmic control with this degree of artistic seriousness. The white space is absolute. The cultural need is urgent. The operator is proven.

Timeline to Premiere

NOW — 2025
Co-producer and sponsor conversations. Arts Council England application. Creative team assembly. Venue shortlist confirmed.
EARLY 2026
Production build commences. Venue locked. Technical design complete. Collaborators contracted.
SEPT 2026
London World Premiere. The exhibition opens. The conversation begins at scale.
2027+
International tour. Wherever the world needs waking up.

Raj Samuel
Malice Arts

Experience designer, cultural strategist, and founder of Malice Arts. A decade of immersive worlds that leave a mark.

It began with a pun. Malice in Wonderland: a beloved story turned inside out, familiar comfort curdled into something darkly unrecognisable. The name stuck. And so did the method.

For a decade, across ten events, Malice Arts brought thousands of participants through immersive worlds built on one question: what if we took something from pop culture — something people thought they understood — and twisted it until they saw it completely differently?

Every event fused music, performance, and set design into something that felt less like a party and more like a world. The Evening Standard, The Handbook, and Time Out followed. Sponsors came. An 85% return rate — because transformative experiences leave a mark.

"The most important types of art are the ones that someone, somewhere, would prefer not to exist."

MALICE ARTS London · Est. 2015
Selected Works
  • 1984 vs 1984
  • Trumpocalypse
  • Blizzard of Odd
  • Once a Tron a Time
  • The Lion, The Glitch & The Wardrobe
  • Bots & Prayers — 2026

If you feel something darkly sacred
is seeping into our digital lives —
this is the moment to name it.

We are seeking Arts Council England support, co-producing venue partners, founding sponsors who stand in opposition to what this exhibition exposes, and creative collaborators who want to build something with genuine consequence.

London Premiere: September 2026  ·  2027 and beyond — wherever the world needs waking up