Why do we need rituals now, perhaps more than ever before? Rituals provide structure, they create patterns for us, rituals are like seasons. In some ways, rituals are technologies for our self regulation – they help us reinforce a sense of belonging and shared purpose. It’s no wonder that in our current attention economy, we yearn for these more sacred and meaningful moments.

As part of our public conversation series, we explored ritual and ceremony as technologies in their own right: tools for sense-making, creative expression, collective alignment, and transformation.

Together, we discussed ritual as a deeply personal, social and creative technology: a container for vulnerability and trust, a rehearsal space for possible futures, and a way of aligning values beyond words. Grounded in the sensory and the collective, the evening asked how this living wisdom might inform the way we design, relate to machines, and allow for more intentional and intuitive ways of being, both with one another and with the technologies we create.

We asked questions around what ancient rituals teach us about sense-making, creative expression, collective alignment, and transformation?

We also looked at how emerging technologies reshaping how we create meaning and access wisdom? Are they enabling new rituals to emerge?

The evening closed with a ritual ceremony led by Eve Gaines, made available to read as an essay. Eve frames ritual as a form of technology, honoring the seven directions and their primal functions: air as interface, fire as spark, water as intelligence, earth as responsibility and the field as living interface. Eve asks us to consider silicon and digital interfaces as extensions of ancient ritual systems – technologies, long before the digital age.

Our panel was made up of a psychologist, digital artist working with language and AI, cultural strategist, artist working with light, sound and water. We were also joined by a ceremonialist and guide.

Jette Muller, co-founder, The Pearl 
Jette Miller is a depth psychologist, coach, writer and filmmaker, devoted to applying ancient wisdom and psychology's core concepts, to technology design. Her passion is AI persona design and language architecture in the realm of building human-centred technology solutions. Jette is the Co-Founder of The Pearl, an interdisciplinary art collective and AI research lab. She is passionate about the space where the imaginary and embodied experience merge, and our inner diversity and creativity, unleash human enchantment.

Georgie Greville, cultural strategist
Georgie Greville (GG) is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and earth-centered spiritual scholar devoted to creating modern initiatory spaces. After a decades-long career across music, film, beauty, and entrepreneurship – including directing cultural campaigns and co-founding a globally recognized clean beauty brand – she stepped away from extractive creative systems to focus on embodied, mythic, and initiatory practice. Shaped by her lived experience navigating patriarchal structures and the profound initiations of birth and motherhood, her work draws from animism, feminist art history, indigenous earth-honoring traditions, somatic ritual, and immersive storytelling.

Connie Bakshi, artist
Connie Bakshi is a Taiwanese-American artist whose practice interrogates diasporic memory, mythologies of power, and autonomous choice. Moving between language, still, and moving image, her work often engages in adversarial processes within artificial intelligence to negotiate the territories of influence between an obscured source and the imposition of a dominant code. Calling on ancestral intelligence, Bakshi probes the boundaries on which the concept of ‘becoming’ is contested, and captures narratives of reconciliation and repair within systems rooted in colonial legacies. Her work has been exhibited with prominent institutions and galleries around the world. 

Eve Gaines, ceremonialist and guide
Eve Gaines is a ceremonialist and guide devoted to helping individuals move through life’s transitions with clarity and reverence. With a background in medical and psychological anthropology focused on rites and rituals, she bridges academic study with lived ceremonial experience. Her work draws from eco-psychology, yoga therapy, somatic integration, and embodied leadership to support transformation that is both personal and collective. As the founder and steward of RITUEL – a 20-acre nature refuge in the Santa Monica Mountains – Eve continues to create spaces where healing, remembrance, and becoming can unfold.

Lachlan Turczan, artist
Lachlan Turczan is an American artist working with light, water and sound.  He has spent the past decade developing an art practice that explores the optical and sonic properties of water. Turczan is interested in how natural phenomena can alter human perception. He has exhibited at museums, design fairs, music festivals and experimental film screenings around the world. Most recently, Turczan presented his new monumental light sculptures Lucida (I-VI) at the Milan Design Week, in April 2025.