God in the Machine: The Ganesh Yourself Experiment

A teleoperated robot roaming in the streets of Mumbai enables anyone to put oneself in the place of the Hindu god Ganesha and have a conversation. Initially conceived as an anthropological experiment, the machine was launched in 2014 and became a collective, political and metaphysical experience. Can a machine make a good divine interface? Likewise, what might be the virtues of hacking a god to understand our relation to machines? The Ganesh Yourself experiment is not only a fascinating exercise in anthropology by design, the first of this kind, but it also leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics and technology, opening unthinkable possibilities.