What Tony Oursler's New MAAT Retrospective Reveals About Why Surveillance Feels Like Sorcery

4. September 2026

MAAT — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon at dusk, wave-form ceramic façade beside the Tagus River

Three decades before smart speakers and predictive algorithms became household fixtures, artist Tony Oursler was already asking why human beings respond to invisible technological forces in almost exactly the way we once responded to ghosts, gods, and omens.

Introduction

On September 15, 2026, Lisbon's Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) opens "Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge – Magic, Media, and Art," a retrospective spanning more than three decades of work by American artist Tony Oursler, running through April 10, 2027. The exhibition is a survey of one continuous argument: that technology and belief have never been separate categories, only different names for humanity's attempt to explain forces it cannot see. Video, sculpture, sound, light, and language appear throughout the show, alongside subjects ranging from surveillance and data flows to magic, religion, conspiracy theories, and the invisible signals that quietly shape daily life.

The timing is not incidental. Clinical psychologists are now treating digital surveillance anxiety as a distinct and rational psychological response to modern technology, not a fringe or irrational fear. As algorithmic tracking, facial recognition, and always-on devices have become ordinary, researchers have found that the uncertainty of not knowing who is watching, what is being collected, or how it will be used keeps people in a state of low-grade hypervigilance — a nervous system response that predates computers by millennia. Oursler's retrospective arrives at the exact moment that observation has become fully rebranded as fear.

The Artist Who Treated Technology as a Belief System

Tony Oursler has spent his career building work that refuses to separate the technical from the mystical. His best-known pieces, including Private and Specular — both featured in the MAAT retrospective — project distorted faces and murmuring voices onto sculptural forms, turning ordinary objects into something that watches back. Long before "smart" devices listened in living rooms, Oursler was staging the unsettling sensation of being observed by something that is not quite human and not quite explainable.

Context: Oursler's career has consistently treated surveillance, data, and belief systems as the same subject examined from different angles, which is precisely why a retrospective of his work lands differently in 2026 than it would have in the 1990s. What once read as speculative or paranoid now reads as documentary. The paranormal imagery he has used for decades — séances, mediums, disembodied voices — was never really about ghosts. It was about the psychological experience of sensing a presence, an intelligence, an authority you cannot locate or negotiate with. That experience now has a name most people encounter daily: the feeling of being tracked by an algorithm you'll never see.

Why Surveillance Feels Like Sorcery

There is a reason the language people use to describe modern technology so often borrows from the language of the occult: devices that "listen," algorithms that "know" what you want before you do, targeted ads that feel like they've read your mind. Perspective: Psychologists studying digital surveillance anxiety describe it as living under the gaze of a modern panopticon — a state in which the mere possibility of being watched is enough to change behavior, regardless of whether anyone is actually watching at all. This is functionally identical to the logic of pre-modern belief systems built around unseen, all-knowing observers.

Research into what clinicians now call the Cyber-Paranoia and Fear Scale has found that concern about being tracked by information technology sits on a spectrum, from healthy skepticism at one end to clinical-level distress at the other. The difference is not the fear itself — it is whether a person can update their beliefs when given new information, or whether every new data point gets absorbed into an expanding, unfalsifiable theory of who is watching and why. Impact: That same tension between rational caution and spiraling suspicion is exactly the emotional terrain Oursler has been sculpting, quite literally, since the 1990s — decades before "surveillance anxiety" had a clinical name.

Where Gothic Cathedrals and Data Centers Meet

Image: Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org

MAAT itself is an unusually fitting stage for this argument. Designed by architect Amanda Levete, the museum's wave-form building sits directly beside the Tejo Power Station, a former electricity plant that once generated the literal current running through Lisbon. The new structure's undulating, hand-tiled façade curves over the riverbank like something between a wave and a shrouded figure, connecting a 20th-century monument to industrial power with a 21st-century monument to art and technology in a single, continuous site.

Context: Housing a show about the psychological overlap between technology and belief inside a building that literally grew out of a power station makes the argument physical before a single artwork is seen. Cathedrals were once built to make the invisible — divine authority — feel present through scale, light, and shadow. Museums like MAAT do something structurally similar for a different invisible force: the unseen flows of data and electricity that now govern daily life.

What This Means for How We Live With Our Screens

Implication: If surveillance anxiety really does share a psychological architecture with older forms of belief in unseen watchers, then the solution is unlikely to be pure technical literacy alone. Cognitive behavioral approaches to digital paranoia already borrow directly from methods developed for managing anxiety and intrusive belief patterns generally — because the nervous system does not distinguish neatly between a suspected algorithm and a suspected spirit. Both trigger the same threat-detection response; both can spiral into the same kind of unfalsifiable thinking if left unexamined.

Oursler's retrospective offers no reassurance and no solution — it simply insists on naming the pattern clearly, using the vocabulary of art rather than the vocabulary of clinical research. That naming is itself valuable. A feeling that has existed for centuries under the name "haunting" and now exists under the name "surveillance anxiety" is, psychologically, the same feeling asking to be taken seriously in a new context.

Conclusion

Tony Oursler's "Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge" does not ask visitors to choose between believing in ghosts and believing in algorithms. It asks something more uncomfortable: to notice that the two beliefs have always run on the same emotional current. The next time a device seems to anticipate a thought before it is finished, it may be worth asking not "how does it know," but "why does this feel so familiar."

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tony Oursler's exhibition at MAAT about?

"Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge – Magic, Media, and Art" is a retrospective of more than three decades of Tony Oursler's work exploring where technology, psychology, belief, and the paranormal overlap, including subjects such as surveillance, data flows, magic, religion, and conspiracy theories, alongside major pieces like Private and Specular and new site-specific installations.

When does the Tony Oursler exhibition at MAAT open?

The exhibition opens September 15, 2026, at MAAT in Lisbon, Portugal, and runs through April 10, 2027.

Why do psychologists compare surveillance anxiety to old superstitions?

Psychologists compare the two because both responses are triggered by the sense of an unseen, all-knowing observer, and both can range from healthy skepticism to unfalsifiable, spiraling suspicion depending on how a person processes new information. Digital surveillance anxiety is now studied as a distinct psychological phenomenon using tools like the Cyber-Paranoia and Fear Scale.

What is MAAT?

MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, is a museum in Lisbon, Portugal, designed by architect Amanda Levete, that connects a wave-form contemporary gallery building to the historic Tejo Power Station along the Tagus River.