CRISTIANO ALVES

Wall of Portuguese azulejos in colour electronic paper — emblem figures exchanged before the viewer

A wall of blue-and-white Portuguese tiles whose figures do not stay put. Behind a real ceramic grid, four electronic-paper panels hold scenes drawn from Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana (Antwerp, 1607). When a visitor stops in front of the wall, one figure is slowly replaced by another — and the moral of the emblem is no longer what it was.

Interactive photochromic diptych — ultraviolet light, photochromic pigment on glass, computer vision

Two glass panels that cannot hold an image for long. When you stop in front of them, your face is captured and written with ultraviolet light onto both. On one, it fades until only white remains. On the other, a stain spreads over it until the face is gone — and then the stain, too, disperses into white.

Instant camera with embedded AI that returns two instant photos of the visitor, one faithful to reality and another in which only the human figure is reinterpreted by the algorithm

Imago Latens is an instant photographic camera with embedded artificial intelligence that captures visitors and returns two instant photos on Instax Square film: one faithful to reality and another in which only the human figure is reinterpreted by the algorithm, against the same background. By keeping the setting unchanged and modifying only the subject, the work exposes the structural bias of computer vision systems and materializes, as a physical and shareable object, the proposition that the machine does not capture who you are, but who it expects you to be. Conceived as an itinerant work, with local and offline AI processing, Imago Latens shifts the debate on artificial intelligence from technical abstraction to the terrain of everyday experience: the banal gesture of taking a photograph becomes a small rite of exposure to the algorithmic gaze.

The machine does not capture who you are, but who it expects you to be.

An installation with Pepper’s Ghost optical effect and offline embedded AI

Daimon ex machina is a multimedia installation that restages,  in the present day, the popular myth of the devil in the bottle. In a wooden cabinet-oratory measuring 96 × 43 × 24 cm, a glass bottle houses, through a Pepper’s Ghost optical system, the animated apparition of a demonic figure inspired by the character Mephistopheles, from Goethe’s "Fausto". The character engages verbally with the audience through embedded, offline artificial intelligence, but does so through the archetype of the trickster: it responds evasively, ambiguously, or simply refuses to answer, deliberately subverting the utilitarian regime of assistive AIs. The work brings together mythical tradition, nineteenth-century optical illusion, and contemporary technology within a single autonomous object-installation, proposing a critical reflection on contemporary imaginaries of artificial intelligence — the machine as a dissimulating oracle that seems to hold all the answers, yet refuses to deliver them fully.

An interactive installation with a caryatid mirror and computer vision

Hierophantes is an interactive installation currently in development, organized around a mirror-object inspired by the caryatid mirrors of Greco-Egyptian antiquity — mirrors whose handle takes the form of a sculpted human figure supporting the reflective disk above its head. On the circular disk, a screen displays, in real time, an interactive animation of the visitor’s body being progressively stripped of its layers — clothing, skin, muscles, organs, skeleton, nothingness — in a dramaturgical arc triggered by physical proximity. The title refers to the priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries, responsible for making visible to initiates that which, without his mediation, would remain hidden. In the work, the sacred revealed by the machine is not external: it is the hidden stratification of the subject’s own image — and, beneath the final layer, the void. A small rite of passage in which the visitor experiences the contingency of their own human form.