The Harbinger

Commissioned by: Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) Programme with funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Exhibitions: Tipping Point, InSpace Gallery, Edinburgh Festival 2025

A warning of what the current social, political, and technological direction of the UK may look, sound, and feel like in the near future.

The Harbinger is a desktop smart speaker-like device from a future where Palantir (the US-based military and governmental intelligence company) has expanded its current contract with the NHS beyond its role as a data managing client to becoming impossible for the NHS to function without. In this future, Palantir have produced the Palantir HealthHub, a voice-activated data processing device that is installed in every GPs office in the UK. The device listens to patient and GP conversations to make inscrutable ‘smart AI-powered analyses’ of the patient’s needs, diagnoses, prescriptions, and necessary appointments, bypassing the GP’s opinion in favour of Palantir-branded ‘automated care’. In this future, these devices have completely superseded the authority of GPs who have become little more than data gathering agents for the devices, inspecting the patient and obediently reporting what they find to the GRIMA voice assistant that is the interface for the HealthHub device.

The Harbinger is a fully functional Palantir HealthHub device, with a custom ‘GRIMA’ interactive voice assistant and large language model that audiences can freely interact with. They can take part in a detailed audio roleplay as either a patient or a GP to understand what the reality of this ‘automated care’ may feel like, or they can simply interrogate the GRIMA assistant to glean more information about this possible-future and the other changes that may come with it. Through this, audiences will experience a tangible glimpse into a future that is very much on the way, but that we still have the capacity to change through collective action.