- 1 The project grew out of the course Tendance motifs, taught by Fabrice Sabatier in the second year o (...)
1Prompt to Play (PtP) is a conversational device that encourages players to reflect on artificial intelligence (AI) and its uses. It was developed in 2024 in collaboration with students at the École supérieure d’art et de communication de Cambrai (ESAC), as part of a course on technological imaginaries.1 In a course unit devoted to AI, we asked how it could be addressed while we remained in the shadow of its mythology. How might other narratives be created, ones that consider the living beings already paying the price for these technologies?
2PtP uses a cartomancy-inspired format based on illustrated cards whose “messages” are interpreted collectively. Unlike a traditional tarot reading, the game is played in a group rather than individually. As the nine card categories are revealed, participants move across different scales (from the individual to the collective), settings (from a classroom to Chinese mining sites), and living beings (from ivy to mad cow disease). In this “game,” what matters most is not established knowledge, but the sharing of stories and experience.
3This text suggests that artistic practices can help bring the socio-ecological stakes of digital technologies into view by drawing them into conversation. It presents the device and situates it within the discourses produced by and about AI. These discourses, we argue, are infused with magic. Prompt to Play is therefore conceived as an exercise in disenchantment, operating through the very structure of the conversations it generates and through the making of imaginaries.
- 2 The program is described as such on the France.tv website.
- 3 In The Great Experiment, ecological issues are addressed only at minute 82, just two minutes before (...)
4On February 11, 2025, as France hosted the AI Action Summit, the television channel France 2 devoted an entire evening’s programming to artificial intelligence. The first half of the evening featured the show2 Artificial Intelligence: The Great Experiment, centered on a series of playful challenges. The show put AI’s feats on display, suggesting that it can still “take us by surprise” in a wide range of tasks. In the second half of the evening, the channel changed course with Henri Poulain’s documentary The Sacrificed of AI (2025). What seemed “impressive” and entertaining at 9:10 p.m. had become a “nightmare” by 10:40 p.m. The spectacle of magic gave way to a focus on the appalling working conditions of data workers, along with the industry’s ecological3 and democratic costs.
5France 2’s schedule that evening exemplifies a recurring divide between what AI does and the material conditions of its existence. On the one hand, experimentation and enthusiasm prevail, tempered at times by concern about competition with human labor in the not-too-distant future. On the other hand, the present takes on more “troubling” tones (Haraway, 2020) when attention turns to energy consumption and extractivism, to working conditions, and to the unavoidable ideological biases embedded in the datasets used to train these models (Crawford, 2024).
6With PtP, we sought to hold together future and present, temptation and fear, fantasy and material reality, since the techno-economic “revolution” and its ecological, social, and political consequences cannot be treated as separate issues. The “game” seeks to move beyond artificial separations and invites participants to consider AI from several perspectives at once. Some categories (Sectors, Practices, Assets, and Impacts) establish themes, while others gesture toward emotions (Inside) [fig. 2]. The links thus woven are political, insofar as they connect intimate experience to social structures (technocapitalism, geopolitics, digital colonialism). They allow movement across scales, from the local to the global, from the anecdotal to the vital, from the individual to the collective. This discontinuous navigation structures the conversation through shifts of scale and changes in register.
Figure 1
PtP card-drawing table.
Photograph: Fabrice Sabatier.
Figure 2
Sample cards from the Sectors, Practices, Assets, Impacts, and Inside categories.
Photograph: Fabrice Sabatier.
7The cards also bring certain entities into the game (Living Beings and Point of View). The conversation may begin, for example, with the cards Stupeur and Police, then veer off as the Pangolin or Japanese knotweed come to the fore. Attention then turns to a given living species, its conditions of life, or its symbolic existence. It is taken up as an object of thought, brought into the conversation, and thought with, as in the case of the hammerhead shark that attacks undersea fiber-optic cables and becomes a potential ally in acts of sabotage. With these cards, the aim is to push AI beyond the dominant techno-economic frame, reattaching to it its “negative externalities.” The conversations that may arise from the draw thus render extractivism—of natural or human resources, for example—inseparable from AI.
8AI systems take hold by making their real costs fade from view, along with the terrestrial, human, and logistical resources their operation requires. This enchantment blunts our collective ability to register their material and ideological dimensions. This sense of magic is reinforced by interfaces that, through the concealment of their inner workings and their encouragement of instinctive use, present the interaction as if nothing intervened between the user’s action and the machine’s response According to Loup Cellard and Anthony Masure (2020), the seeming transparency of interfaces, based on fluid interaction and the opacity of their technical layers, “annihilates any reflexivity about how programs function.” Nolwenn Maudet, Anaëlle Beignon, and Thomas Thibault (2025) extend this observation by examining applications and software that incorporate AI-based features. They point to the widespread adoption of a “visual semantics of magic,” particularly the purple sparkle icon used to signal AI assistance. This is compounded by the indeterminacy of the functions associated with the icon, which is used for a range of purposes, thus blurring expectations: “These metaphors are convenient insofar as they allow questions of efficiency and environmental or political effects to be sidestepped, casting an opaque process of data generation as a magical event.”
9By acting as magicians, AI systems shape perceptions, discourses, and practices. To counter these effects, artists and researchers such as Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin, in the installation Atlas of Clouds, seek to make visible the logistical and material systems concealed by everyday uses of digital technologies. Others, such as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler in Anatomy of an AI System, map the human and nonhuman infrastructures that make, for example, a voice-activated smart speaker possible. These practices contribute to the demystification of AI and to the formation of essential theoretical and sensory knowledge. Nevertheless, if we take a form of enchantment to structure our relations to AI, this approach may prove insufficient. As Pignarre and Stengers note, it is not enough to denounce or explain a “witch’s hold” in order to free oneself from it (Pignarre & Stengers, 2007).
10PtP takes a different approach, combining a didactic dimension—the sharing of knowledge and experience—with the activation of alternative imaginaries. Rather than demystifying AI or attempting to dispel its magic, it seeks to confront it on its own terrain, that of magic and imaginaries, by producing counter-narratives that politicize technology and prompt action. PtP thus extends the cartomancies developed by the Unbewitch Finance Lab4 practices that guide discussions of financial markets and generate incantations that serve at once as intentions and acts. It is this articulation between imagination and action that we turn to next.
11In PtP, the cards are revealed gradually and interpreted in relation to one another, shaping the meaning of the draw. With nine cards turned over in succession, however, an overall view is nearly impossible [fig. 3]. Although the rules of the “game” invite participants to seek one, no single message takes shape, only repeated attempts at pathways. From this effort to create links between the cards, an imaginary takes shape. Imagination is not only representational but creative; it works through intermediary images, off-stage scenes, the unspoken, and hypotheses. Imagination weaves the links between the cards. If AI systems enchant us and divert our attention from their material conditions, the imaginaries produced by PtP can be understood as a form of counter-magic, through which the different facets of AI are unfolded and held together.
Figure 3
Complete draw featuring the cards Anger, Health, Cuckoo, Creative Tool, Deepfake, Power, Vladimir Putin, Plagiarism, and Transgress.
Photograph: Tomek Jarolim.
- 5 For a more detailed engagement with Bruno on the problem of representing complexity, see chapter 5, (...)
12In the Renaissance, the theologian and philosopher Giordano Bruno defined magic as a “science of the imaginary” (Couliano, 1984) and made the creation of links central to magical practice. These links take varied forms, grounded in reason or imagination, affective or sensory. They animate magic as an art “that moves beyond a purely theoretical reflection on the order of the universe and the forces that set it in motion, toward a genuine activity aimed at changing the world” (Donné & Sonnier, 2016). PtP may thus be conceived as a magical device that weaves cognitive links and affects among participants, entities, subjects, images, forms of knowledge, and lived experience; articulates them into narratives; and brings them into existence, conditions prerequisite for taking a position and acting. The resulting network generates the seeds of a shared political imaginary, through which it becomes possible to act at a distance upon things and those who are “linked.”5 In PtP, this capacity for action becomes visible at the close of the draw, when a collective “reply” to AI systems is composed. Grounded in the conversation, the reply takes the form of a commitment, a rule, or an incantation. The process does not end with the draw or the paths explored; the imaginaries thus opened unfold in practice.
13In the drawing protocol, each card appears as a new clue, potentially revealing earlier paths as mistaken and opening new ones for exploration. Mark Fisher describes capitalist realism as the embodiment, in representation and art, of Margaret Thatcher’s there is no alternative. The perception of “neoliberal life and its harms” as natural, together with the inability to imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism (Fisher, 2024), is partly responsible for this state of affairs. The rhetoric surrounding the development of AI fits squarely within this strategy of stifling alternatives. Dominant discourse presents its evolution and generalization as a natural slope (“we will have to get used to it,” “we must train our students because these will be their future tools, whether we like it or not,” etc.). The future is thus already mapped out, as an extension of the present.
14Such a bifurcation, unthinkable within “technological realism,” is what artistic practices may attempt to render imaginable. The problem then becomes less the existence of AI than the collective imaginary that seeks to make it unavoidable and to fix its uses. PtP makes it possible to tell stories of AI abandoned, AI resisted, AI diverted. But above all, it makes room for counter-narratives—minoritarian yet innumerable—drawn from history or from contemporary digital practices.
15With this card “game,” AI is treated as a fable; narratives link to experience and are woven together; past, present, and future come into play; we are here and elsewhere, in our bodies, with others, with plants and animals. The device does not aim to model AI systems; rather, it repositions us as technological beings, dependent in multiple ways on social and ecological environments or microcosms.