Exvotos, also known as votive offerings, are ritual figures that date back thousands of years. The offerings are presented to a god with a request and the hope for help. They usually represent a symbolic embodiment of the problem. Mira Klug used an AI image generator (Midjourney) to generate new images from an image archive of historical votive offerings (/imagine prompt). She then molded these images into blue wax figures and placed them next to reproductions of original votive offerings.

The work views artificial intelligence as a complex bundle of expectations, ideologies, desires, and fears, and connects this with the religious practice of votive offerings. Religious belief and power have always been closely linked. Artificial intelligence embodies the ideology of a god-like dualism: it is understood as disembodied intelligence that has no connection to the material world and is connected to a messianic promise of salvation.
The work takes a critical look at the myth and ideology of this socio-technical system in order to question new forms of power, control, and transcendence.