Within a closed loop of ritual and ridicule, gestures repeat with brittle energy. Laughter without sound. Metal without blood. A doll giant sits at the center—unmoving, ambiguous, possibly resilient. The mood is theatrical, but something deeper simmers beneath the absurdity. The scene teeters between confrontation and play, power and performance, until the line between the two dissolves. I’m interested to learn what the skeletons might symbolize for individual viewers.
This video is part of Codex Machina, a series that combines the idea of the codex—a historical manuscript used to record knowledge—with the machine. It is an evolving archive of vignettes depicting conflict and response, where history is continuously rewritten through mythology and AI-driven processes. Each vignette centers on a doll or dolls—variably victims, witnesses, unwitting participants, or oracles—positioned within a liminal space between the sacred and the profane, power and subjugation, individual fragility and broader cycles of destruction, the personal and the political. Just as AI has become a tool for reshaping archetypal narratives, the blockchain serves as a contemporary codex to record them—a decentralized, immutable archive ensuring these reinterpretations persist, rather than being lost or erased.
Codex Machina extends the thematic core of my work, both in AI video and in a long career of installation and relational aesthetics - interrogating cycles of human experience, allowing uncomfortable questions to surface rather than resolve.
Sound design by Barbara Chira.