4. Daimon ex machina

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.