DORTMUND, Germany — “Let’s use smartphones and tarot cards to connect to spirits,” reads the writing on the wall, illuminated in soft ultraviolet light. “Let’s manufacture D.I.Y. devices to listen to invisible worlds.”

The incantations, printed as wallpaper, are part of the French artist Lucile Olympe Haute’s “Cyberwitches Manifesto,” an installation in a show called “Technoshamanism” that is at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany, through March 6, 2022. The group exhibition, which brings together the work of 12 artists and collectives, explores the connections between technology and esoteric, ancestral belief systems.

In our always-online lives, the supernatural is having a high-tech moment. Spirituality is all over our feeds: The self-help guru Deepak Chopra has co-founded his own NFT platform, witches are reading tarot on TikTok, and the A.I.-driven astrology app Co-Star has been downloaded more than 20 million times.

Dr. Jeffrey A. Tolbert, an assistant professor who researches belief and digital ethnography at Penn State Harrisburg has an explanation. “Because of the globalizing potential of the internet, people have access to belief traditions that were not easily accessible to them before,” he said. In the United States, a growing number of people identify as “spiritual” but not “religious,” he noted, adding that the internet allowed those people to discover, select and combine the spiritual traditions that most appealed to them.

The curator of “Technoshamanism,” Inke Arns, said on a recent tour of the show that contemporary artists also recognized the widespread presence of esoteric spirituality in the digital space. “I was asking myself, ‘How come, in different parts of the world, there is this strange interest in not only reactivating ancestral knowledge but bringing this together with technology?’” she said.

Often, for artists, the answer comes down to anxiety about the environment, Arns said. “People realize we are in a very dire situation,” she added, “from burning coal and fossil fuels. And it’s not stopping.” Ancient belief systems that were more in tune with nature, combined with new technology, were providing a sense of hope for artists in facing the climate crisis, she said.

While technological progress is often seen as damaging to the environment, artists, Indigenous activists and hackers were trying to reclaim technology for their own, esoteric purposes, said Fabiane Borges, a Brazilian researcher and member of a network called Tecnoxamanismo. That collective organizes meetings and festivals in which participants use devices including D.I.Y.-hacked robots to connect with ancestral belief systems and the natural world.

In the Dortmund show, a sense of hope shines through in several works that imagine a future for humans beyond Earth. Fifty prints by the British artist Suzanne Treister from the series “Technoshamanic Systems: New Cosmological Models for Survival” fill one wall of the museum, dreaming spiritual possibilities for the survival of our species.

Treister’s neat, colorful works on paper feature flying saucers and stars laid out in a kabbalah tree-of-life diagram, and blueprints for imagined scientific systems and extraterrestrial architecture. As billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos look to outer space as the next frontier for human expansion, Treister has imagined a utopian alternative: space exploration as a process in which rituals and visions play as much of a role as solar power and artificial intelligence.

Many esoteric practices connect communities to a higher power, Arns said, which is why outer space features in so many contemporary artists’ explorations of spirituality. “It’s making a link between the microcosm and macrocosm,” she added, creating “an idea of a world that doesn’t only include the Earth.”

Technologists have, of course, come up with a more digital way to enter new worlds: virtual reality. Many of V.R.’s founders were interested in psychedelic experiences, a common feature of shamanic rituals. (The recent boom in ayahuasca ceremonies, where participants drink a psychoactive brew, shows that the attraction remains strong.) Researchers at the University of Sussex, in England, even used V.R. to attempt replicating a magic mushroom hallucination.

In the “Technoshamanism” show in Dortmund, several works offer the viewer trippy visions. Morehshin Allahyari’s V.R. work “She Who Sees the Unknown” conjures a sinister female djinn; at the artist’s request, the V.R. headset is worn lying down in the darkened space so that the malevolent spirit hovers menacingly over the viewer. Another work, experienced through augmented-reality glasses, leads the viewer through a meditative ritual in a gigantic papier-mâché shrine, weaving a spiraling light path with video holograms.

Rather than inventing their own virtual spiritual sites, other artists try to uncover the lost meaning of some that already exist. Tabita Rezaire, for example, whose website describes her as “infinity incarnated into an agent of healing,” is showing a film installation exploring megalithic stone circles in Gambia and Senegal. In a film playing on a flat-screen TV laid out on the museum floor, Rezaire investigates the original purpose of the ancient sites through documentary interviews with their local guardians, as well as with astronomers and archaeologists. Drawing on numerology, astrology and traditional African understanding of the cosmos, the interviews are superimposed into hypnotic CGI visualizations of outer space.

Technology and spirituality could also come together to preserve ancient cultural practices that might otherwise be lost, Borges, the researcher, said. She recalled that, at a 2016 festival organized by her network in Bahia, Brazil, teenagers with cellphones had recorded a full-moon ritual performed by members of the Pataxó, an Indigenous community. The footage, which showed Pataxó people speaking their ancient language in a trance, was later passed to local university researchers who are at work on expanding a dictionary, Borges said.

Interactions between new tools and esoteric practices can be seen across all sorts of mystical practices, Tolbert of Penn State said. “Technology has always been a part of spirituality,” he noted, citing psychic mediums hosting their own Facebook groups and ghost hunters using electromagnetic field detectors. “Most of them don’t see it, I think, as presenting any kind of a conflict,” he added.

Perhaps, then, as the “Cyberwitches Manifesto” suggests, there is more common ground than might be expected between the hackers and the witches, the programmers and the psychics. As Tolbert put it: “What is technology, if not a way for an individual person to uncover answers?”

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a bill to expand protections for people who speak up about discrimination in the workplace.

A new website arrived to offer tech workers advice on how to come forward about mistreatment by their employers.

And Apple responded to a shareholder proposal that asked it to assess how it used confidentiality agreements in employee harassment and discrimination cases.

The disparate developments had one thing — or, rather, a person — in common: Ifeoma Ozoma.

Since last year, Ms. Ozoma, 29, a former employee of Pinterest, Facebook and Google, has emerged as a central figure among tech whistle-blowers. The Yale-educated daughter of Nigerian immigrants, she has supported and mentored tech workers who needed help speaking out, pushed for more legal protections for those employees and urged tech companies and their shareholders to change their whistle-blower policies.

She helped inspire and pass the new California law, the Silenced No More Act, which prohibits companies from using nondisclosure agreements to squelch workers who speak up against discrimination in any form. Ms. Ozoma also released a website, The Tech Worker Handbook, which provides information on whether and how workers should blow the whistle.

“It’s really sad to me that we still have such a lack of accountability within the tech industry that individuals have to do it” by speaking up, Ms. Ozoma said in an interview.

Her efforts — which have alienated at least one ally along the way — are increasingly in the spotlight as restive tech employees take more action against their employers. Last month, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, revealed that she had leaked thousands of internal documents about the social network’s harms. (Facebook has since renamed itself Meta.) Apple also recently faced employee unrest, with many workers voicing concerns about verbal abuse, sexual harassment, retaliation and discrimination.

Ms. Ozoma is now focused on directly pushing tech companies to stop using nondisclosure agreements to prevent employees from speaking out about workplace discrimination. She has also met with activists and organizations that want to pass legislation similar to the Silenced No More Act elsewhere. And she is constantly in touch with other activist tech workers, including those who have organized against Google and Apple.

Much of Ms. Ozoma’s work stems from experience. In June 2020, she and a colleague, Aerica Shimizu Banks, publicly accused their former employer, the virtual pinboard maker Pinterest, of racism and sexism. Pinterest initially denied the allegations but later apologized for its workplace culture. Its workers staged a walkout, and a former executive sued the company over gender discrimination.

“It’s remarkable how Ifeoma has taken some very painful experiences, developed solutions for them and then built a movement around making those solutions a reality,” said John Tye, the founder of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit that provides legal support to whistle-blowers. He and Ms. Ozoma recently appeared on a webinar to educate people on whistle-blower rights.

Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee who helped organize a 2018 walkout over the company’s sexual harassment policy, added of Ms. Ozoma: “She has stuck around and worked to help others blow the whistle more safely.”

Ms. Ozoma, who grew up in Anchorage and Raleigh, N.C., became an activist after a five-year career in the tech industry. A political science major, she moved to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to join Google in government relations. She then worked at Facebook in Silicon Valley on international policy.

In 2018, Pinterest recruited Ms. Ozoma to its public policy team. There, she helped bring Ms. Banks on board. They spearheaded policy decisions including ending the promotion of anti-vaccination information and content related to plantation weddings on Pinterest, Ms. Ozoma said.

Yet Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks said they faced unequal pay, racist comments and retaliation for raising complaints at Pinterest. They left the company in May 2020. A month later, during the Black Lives Matter protests, Pinterest posted a statement supporting its Black employees.

Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks said Pinterest’s hypocrisy had pushed them to speak out. On Twitter, they disclosed their experiences as Black women at the company, with Ms. Ozoma declaring that Pinterest’s statement was “a joke.”

In a statement, Pinterest said it had taken steps to increase diversity. On Wednesday, the company settled a shareholder suit about its workplace culture and pledged $50 million to diversity and inclusion efforts.

By speaking out, Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks took a risk. That’s because they broke the nondisclosure agreements they had signed with Pinterest when they left the company. California law, which offered only partial protection, didn’t cover people speaking out about racial discrimination.

Peter Rukin, their lawyer, said he had an idea: What if state law was expanded to ban nondisclosure agreements from preventing people speaking out on any workplace discrimination? Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks soon began working with a California state senator, Connie Leyva, a Democrat, on a bill to do just that. It was introduced in February.

“I’m just so proud of these women for coming forward,” Ms. Levya said.

Along the way, Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks fell out. Ms. Banks said she no longer spoke with Ms. Ozoma because Ms. Ozoma had recruited her to Pinterest without disclosing the discrimination there and then excluded her from working on the Silenced No More Act.

“Ifeoma then cut me out of the initiative through gaslighting and bullying,” Ms. Banks said.

Ms. Ozoma said she had not cut Ms. Banks out of the organizing. She added that Ms. Banks had “felt left out” because news coverage focused on Ms. Ozoma’s role.

Since leaving Pinterest, Ms. Ozoma has moved to Santa Fe, N.M., where she lives with a flock of chickens she calls the Golden Girls. She also runs a tech equity consulting firm, Earthseed.

Through Earthseed, Ms. Ozoma is continuing her whistle-blowing work. She is collaborating with the nonprofit Open MIC and the consulting firm Whistle Stop Capital to stop tech companies from using nondisclosure agreements to keep workers anywhere from coming forward on discrimination.

In September, Ms. Ozoma, Whistle Stop Capital and Open MIC, along with the social impact investor Nia Impact Capital, filed a shareholder proposal at Apple. The proposal asked the company to assess the risks associated with the use of concealment clauses for employees who have experienced harassment and discrimination.

Last month, Apple said in a letter that it wouldn’t take action on the proposal, arguing that the company “does not limit employees’ and contractors’ ability to speak freely about harassment, discrimination and other unlawful acts in the workplace.” It declined to comment beyond the letter.

Ms. Ozoma also supports and counsels other tech activists. The Tech Worker Handbook website, in part, was designed to help with that. The website has information on how to navigate nondisclosure agreements and how to protect against corporate surveillance or physical threats. Across the top of the site is a slogan: “Preparedness Is Power.” Since it went online on Oct. 6, the site has had over 53,000 visitors, Ms. Ozoma said.

“I send it to people who are thinking about coming forward,” said Ashley Gjovik, a former activist employee at Apple who has relied on Ms. Ozoma for support. When people think about whistle-blowing, she added, “their mind won’t go to the places of the personal, digital, security stuff, all of the legal ramifications, how do you even get that story out, the impact on friends and family, the impact on your mental health.”

Last month, Ms. Ozoma also got a call from Cher Scarlett, another activist Apple employee who left the company this month. (Ms. Scarlett declined to provide her real name for security reasons; she is legally changing her name to Cher Scarlett.) She asked Ms. Ozoma how to pass legislation like the Silenced No More Act in her home state, Washington.

Ms. Ozoma described the steps she had taken, including working closely with a lawmaker who could write a bill, Ms. Scarlett said.

Along with another tech activist, Ms. Scarlett then contacted Karen Keiser, a Washington state senator and a Democrat. Ms. Keiser now plans to sponsor a bill to expand whistle-blower protections when the legislative session starts in January, her office said.

“This is why the network of whistle-blowers and women like Ifeoma are so important,” Ms. Scarlett said.