4. Daimon ex machina

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.