House of IFs
︎︎︎House of IFs (2026)
House of IFs is a daily agentic system that turns current news into omens. Each day, the system gathers unusual events (faits divers) alongside major news stories, and searches earlier reporting for comparable relationships. It then uses these correlations to construct an omen in IF/THEN form. The structure draws on Mesopotamian divination, where observed signs were linked to possible outcomes.
Each omen includes an explanation, visible sources and a counter-action (namburbu). The omens accumulate into a growing interactive archive and spatial map, where visitors can browse, vote and leave their interpretations. A Scribe chatbot lets visitors ask questions about the omens, their sources and the system itself.
House of IFs was shown at Watershed in Bristol in June 2026, released publicly in August 2026, and displayed at NordiCHI in Vaasa in October 2026.
Technical details / implementation: Multi-step LLM agent pipeline, automated daily generation, web search and API integration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), short- and long-term memory, automated omen review and benchmarking, MySQL database, semantic embeddings and spatial archive visualisation, RAG-based chatbot with source retrieval, museum collection image retrieval, participatory voting and commenting, automated moderation, interaction analytics, custom web interface (draggable windows, image dithering algorithm), sound design, physical computing (Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, e-ink display, accelerometer, haptic feedback and audio).