Visa for the Field of the Future

Part of: The Kuling Project · MOAT, Department of Migration (MOAT/DM/003)

Interactive performance 2025
Temporary consulate desk with waiting area and interview station
1:1 interviews, 5–10 minutes per participant, printed forms, stamps, fictional ID cards, and certificates

Performance at the Kosovo Consulate, Stuttgart, 2025 — Photo Credit: Lanxin Zhang

This work transforms a small office into the Kuling Consulate and invites visitors to apply for a Visa for the Field of the Future. Each participant has a one-to-one visa
interview with Consular Officer No. 2777, answering paired questions about land, memory, borders, and destiny.

Questions about the past and present are decided through jiao (筊) divination, while questions about the future must be answered in the participant’s own voice. Their responses are written down on bureaucratic forms, and each interview ends with a stamped Fiktionsbescheinigung that can temporarily replace their identity and assigns a fictional file number as a new ID.

The piece stages a procedure in which the answer to a bureaucratic question is decided by the toss of the moon-shaped divination blocks. The forms remain bureaucratic. What runs through them is an oracle.

This is the same operation that now sits at the centre of generative AI. A prompt enters a process that the user cannot inspect, an output emerges, and the output varies between runs. The visa interview at the Kuling Consulate performs this operation slowly in a room while casting moon blocks. Decisions arrive without reasons, and the institution functions anyway.