Contemporary Prophecies is an art installation in the form of a food stand. The stand offers handmade fortune cookies that contain scientific statistical statements inside. Replacing the classical “fortunes” messages with statistical facts, the project explores the thin line between predictions and prophecies and to which extent it is possible to separate both. Furthermore, the installation raises
questions about the role that statistics have in our society and the way we relate to quantitative data as an unquestionable truth. The aim of the installation is not only to ask whether big data could be a contemporary form of oracle, but also to point out its obscured power in shaping our society. Although fortune cookies are commonly offered in Chinese restaurants and are considered Asian, they are actually an American invention. Therefore, the using socioeconomic data points out the two-directional nature of cultural influence. While the messages featured in the early cookies were normally Biblical sayings or recommended lottery numbers, today they are cryptic and nonsensical feel-good messages. The cookies are separated to different categories: health, love, professional life, etc. By choosing from these different categories, the visitors can discover their possible futures, but according to predictions that come from real local sources and are representative of the actual percentage in the local population. That means that the percentage of probabilities of a topic will be reflected in the amount of cookies predicting it.
