Mitraism to Machinism | Ala Roushan & Charles Stankievech

In this talk, artists and researchers Ala Roushan and Charles Stankievech trace a lineage from ancient worship of the sun to contemporary planetary modelling and solar geoengineering.

They discuss their film A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads (2025), which is a speculative reconstruction of a ritual to Mitra, a Sun god. Today, amid human-caused warming, we again turn to the sky — but this time through AI-driven climate models and proposals to engineer the atmosphere. Modelling has shifted from observation to intervention.

As planetary simulations gain power, urgent questions arise: who governs these systems, and where does the model end and material reality begin? The coming storm, they suggest, is not only meteorological, but geopolitical.