CRISTIANO ALVES

Wall of Portuguese azulejos in color electronic paper, with emblem figures swapped in front of the viewer

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

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, a camera captures your face and ultraviolet light writes it onto both. On one, it fades until only white is left. On the other, a stain spreads over it until the face is gone, and then the stain itself breaks up and clears to white.

Instant camera with embedded AI: two prints of each visitor, one faithful, one with only the person reinterpreted

Imago Latens is an instant camera with embedded artificial intelligence. It photographs each visitor and prints two photos on Instax Square film: one faithful to the scene, and one in which the algorithm has reinterpreted only the person, against the same background. Since nothing else in the picture changes, the pair exposes the structural bias of computer vision as a physical object that visitors can keep and share. The camera is built to travel, which moves the debate about artificial intelligence out of technical circles and into everyday life: having your picture taken, an ordinary thing, becomes a direct encounter with the way an algorithm sees you.

The second print is who the machine expects you to be.

Installation with a Pepper's ghost illusion and offline embedded AI

Daimon ex machina is a multimedia installation that brings the folk legend of the devil in the bottle into the present. Inside a wooden oratório, a household shrine cabinet 67 cm tall, 44 cm wide, and 16 cm deep, a Pepper's ghost setup makes an animated demonic figure appear in a glass bottle. The figure is inspired by Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust. It talks with visitors through offline AI built into the piece, but it plays the trickster: it answers evasively or ambiguously, or simply refuses to answer, deliberately undercutting the utilitarian logic of AI assistants. Folk myth, a nineteenth-century stage illusion, and current technology share a single self-contained object, and together they offer a critical take on how we picture artificial intelligence today: a dissembling oracle that seems to have every answer but never gives a straight one.

Interactive installation with a caryatid mirror and computer vision

Hierophantes is an interactive installation built around a sculptural mirror based on the Greek caryatid mirrors of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, in which a figure, usually female, stands on a base and holds the bronze disk above its head. Here the disk is a round LCD screen behind semi-reflective glass, so at first it works as a mirror. When a visitor comes close, their reflection disappears and an anatomical image of their own body takes its place. In real time the screen strips that image away, layer by layer: clothing, skin, muscle, skeleton, organs, until the subject vanishes completely into an opaque white. The title comes from the hierophant, the priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries whose role was to show initiates what would otherwise stay hidden. Here the mirror shows the visitor how contingent their own body is.