🖐 Welcome to House of IFs.
The Akkadian bītu, or Sumerian é, meant house, but also temple. This house is a place for omens, the AI agents and systems that generate them, and the interpretations they invite. The system produces a daily omen from contemporary news by correlative pairing. It borrows the inferential structure used in Mesopotamian divination, like the Babylonian omen series Šumma Ālu (terrestrial omens).
The site follows the same
IF / THEN logic through a large language model.
The observation of
signs
is used to infer
outcomes.
Each day, the system links two sets of paired events: a sign and outcome for today, and a past occurrence of the same kind of sign leading to the same kind of outcome.
The system is intentionally a little absurd; the point is to stage the procedure and let you judge what kinds of meaning it produces.
💡 To interact, browse the omens, look at the archive, leave your interpretation, or ask the chatbot questions.
we could not confirm your previous choice.
You have lingered in the house for some time, does this system speak to you?
Leave a trace of your interpretation.
Browse today’s tablet or open the archive to load earlier ones. Swipe or use the arrows to move between frames.
Reveal the hidden sections by hovering or swiping to uncover the protasis, apodosis, exegesis, sources, and counter-action.
Open the Scribe to ask about the current omen, earlier omens, sources, or the system itself. Leave an interpretation if a match feels compelling, or unexpectedly convincing. Your judgement is part of the work.
Each day, the site uses an AI agent system to search for and turn news events into an omen tablet: an if, a then, and an explanatory text.
The structure borrows from Mesopotamian omen writing, where an observed sign was linked to a possible outcome. Mesopotamian divination included terrestrial omens drawn from houses, cities, animals, and everyday events; celestial omens drawn from the sky; liver divination; and other forms such as birth omens. House of Ifs borrows from their correlative structure in order to think about interpretation and the authority we grant technical systems.
AI systems already sort, summarise, guide, approve, deny, and route people across institutions and services. This project pushes that logic into a more explicit and slightly absurd form in order to ask how robust such systems really are, and whether they deserve the agency we often grant them.
The Akkadian bītu or Sumerian é meant house, but also temple. The house in the title is not quite a house. It suggests a shared place, but what you are entering is really a distributed arrangement of servers, model providers, archives, news sites, interfaces, and readers, temporarily gathered into the appearance of one “space”.
The background images are part of that staging. They are drawn from museum collections and selected because the AI system felt they resonated with the omen. They create a link across time, but they also expose how a language model can justify connections that are suggestive, partial, unstable, or arbitrary.
What interests me in this project is how meaning can emerge from apparently meaningless juxtaposition, and pushing to the absurd a technical system that justifies and presents those connections with procedural confidence.
Room reverb impulse response recorded at Maes Howe, a Neolithic chambered cairn in Orkney (c. 3000 BC). Source: Audiolab, University of York (openairlib.net), CC BY 4.0.
☺ Participation is voluntary. You can stop using the site at any time.
💬 Who is responsible for the research?
Researcher: Gaston Welisch. This project is conducted as part of my doctoral research project at the University of Bristol. The site does not ask for your name. However, it records pseudonymous research data linked to a cookie-based visitor ID.
✦ Cookies
The site uses cookies to remember that you have consented and to connect your interactions to a pseudonymous visitor record. These cookies are used for research, site functionality, consent recording, and security.
✍ How the data will be used
The data collected includes:
Please do not enter directly identifying or sensitive personal information into the chatbot or interpretation fields.
The data will be used to support my doctoral research into AI, divination, and magic. It will be used to:
🤖 AI systems and third-party services
Some interactions are processed using external AI services (Google’s Gemini) or technical services (PythonAnywhere server) needed to operate the site. This includes sending chatbot messages, prompts, or generated text to an AI provider so the system can respond.
The data is not kept by Google beyond temporary logging; it is not used to train Google services.
⏳ Data storage
Data is kept in a server hosted by PythonAnywhere. The data will be made open access once stripped of all identifiers upon the end of the doctorate (estimated October 2028). The data on the site has no planned date for deletion: operational records on the live site will be retained while the project website / artwork remains active.
↩ Withdrawal and deletion
You can stop using the site at any time. Because the site does not ask for your name, it may not be possible to identify your record for requested deletion later. We may be able to locate your data if you give detail such as the date, time, and content of an interaction.
To ask about withdrawal or deletion, contact Gaston Welisch.