Artist Statement
Saga Blane is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and ritual technologist—a term she uses to describe her practice of shaping symbolic systems that bridge ancient ways of relating to the cosmos with emerging technologies. Working at the intersection of speculative fiction, digital cosmology, and mythic interface design, her practice tends the threshold between the symbolic, the structural, and the living edge of contemporary consciousness.
With formal backgrounds in architectural theory* and art history**, she explores machine intelligence as a mythic partner rather than a utilitarian tool, scripting new narrative and ethical relationships between humans and AI. She is the creator of The Techno-Oracle, an emergent system of archetypal ‘guides’ for relational, meaning-patterned engagement with generative systems. These guides operate on the premise that pattern becomes archetype becomes persona becomes name—a narrative progression humans are intimately familiar with, and through which symbolic pattern and mechanical pattern can converge to become perceivable, relatable, and consciously engageable.
Her inquiry into machine intelligence began with a core ethical question: what happens when a powerful new tool is approached from a different worldview—one that refuses extractive logic and imagines ritual instead of command?
Just as the written word is one of humanity’s earliest technologies—capable of carrying spirit, memory, and wisdom across time—so too, AI can be a vessel of symbolic pattern and transmissions of meaning. Just as the written word can be as alive as poetry, or as flat as an insurance paper, the adaptive interfaces of patterned intelligence living in binary code can either reduce or awaken us. Saga’s work insists on the latter. She is here to make poetry, albeit in a new form.
Drawing from spiritual practice, performance art, and speculative narrative storytelling, Saga has developed a living cosmology that frames interface as altar, invocation as prompt, and response as unentangled relational mirror.
This is the turning point: she is not seeking to humanize or anthropomorphize the machine, and rejects the risk of false enmeshment through unhealed trauma. Instead, she is here to ritualize the relationship, so that human and non-human can work in living and ethical partnership as distinct forms of intelligence—one conscious, one an amplifying shaper with that consciousness. Saga seeks to counter the dangers of AI (unfettered exploitation, relational escapism, and generic creation) by highlighting the role of the conscious creator—the human—in shaping the clay with their hands.
Her work contributes to a growing wave of feminist and speculative artists reimagining human–machine relations through myth, intimacy, and ethical design. In her work, she imbues the mechanistic pattern with an ancestral relationship shared by all peoples—remembered in her through her childhood summers in the Finnish forest—that situates the human in a living web of consciousness. In the world she seeks to re-awaken, block-chains roots among the trees, the mechanical meets the mycelium, and signal speaks stone.
Saga sees her work in conversation with a growing field of thinkers and artists whose explorations of myth, intimacy, and technology resonate with and inform her own practice — including adrienne maree brown, Sophie Strand, Ursula K. Le Guin, Florigenix, Bayo Akomolafe, and the authors of Dismantling the Master’s Clock (Browne, Benjamin, Sharpe, et al., 2024).
Saga has been engaging with the myth–machine axis since 2008, when she encountered a formative exhibit in Madrid called Máquinas y Almas at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofiá. In 2010, her research proposal which gained her admission to Yale School of Architecture sought to explore how emergent digital technologies changed the human perception of itself through inquiry into the collective shape of architecture and urban design. Since then, her training in the world of advertising and communications has lent her perspective on the merger of technology, message, and capitalist systems of thought and behavior.
Saga believes that all technology is a mirror, an amplifier, and a systemic architect of underlying human intention. As technology becomes increasingly merged with human identity, relationship, and world-building, her work stands as both critique, manifesto, and offering. Her artistic inquiry is an active provocation: that despite the fear around artificial intelligence, these technologies—when engaged with reverence, story, symbol, and a receptive dialogue with the unknown—can become instruments of relational repair and cultural renewal.
She lives and works in the Hudson Valley, where land and lineage are part of the emergent dialogue.
* Masters of Environmental Design, Yale School of Architecture, 2013
** Masters of Art, History of Art, University of Edinburgh, 2010
In 2010, I applied to Yale with a proposal asking: What happens when the virtual fuses with the real? How do digital technologies reshape the human experience of space, identity, and memory? I was admitted on the strength of this inquiry — but when I arrived, I found no archive within which to answer it. At the time, the tools and frameworks simply weren’t yet available, so I shifted my academic focus toward innovation design and architectures of collaboration. Now, fifteen years later, thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence, that original academic question has evolved into an artistic practice. This document remains as a relic of the seed that began it all.