The Gentle Oraclebird

Shing Yin Khor & Three Eyed Rat

The Gentle Oraclebird is an interactive installation game, and a narrative exploration of kindness, using ritual and storytelling, and a new divination mechanism inspired and derived from the Chinese tradition of “lottery sticks,” tarot decks, and carnival-based fortune telling mechanisms and games.

This version of the Gentle Oraclebird is built into a wheeled cart and is manned by an Oracle. Participants are invited to toss a twig ball into a divination pit, where the bowl that the ball falls into determines their specific divination. In return, the Oracle will give them their fortune card to keep.

The original version of the Gentle Oraclebird was built into a room as an interactive installation piece; the current version will be built as a portable cart for accessibility and transportability. The cart also contains an assortment of other narrative ephemera about the Oraclebird’s life, including a capsule machine converted to dispense kind words, epistolary stories, and a tea set.

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