Prompt to Play: A cartomancy for outwitting AI and forming imaginaries
Fabrice Sabatier · Hybrid · 2026
Much of the dominant discourse treats artificial intelligence (AI) as detached from its material conditions. In interface design, a rhetoric of magic further diverts attention from the socio-ecological mechanisms that make AI possible. To counter this disembodied relationship to AI, and alongside descriptive and instructional approaches, artistic practices can help make visible and imaginable the links between AI’s promises, its uses, and its costs. Prompt to Play is a card-based device designed to make connections between different approaches to AI. Drawing on cartomancy, the cards guide a conversation that moves from the personal to the collective, from the local to the global, and from past trajectories to future possibilities. This article introduces the “game” by examining the discourses and narratives through which AI is encountered and understood. It also questions the tendency to treat AI as magical and suggests responding to this on the level of imaginaries.