A doll-like figure lies in the grass, its breath slow, eyes flickering open and shut as cascading streams of code flicker behind it. The scene is quiet yet unsettling — evoking a body both human and artificial, suspended between rest and awakening, between the natural world and a manufactured consciousness.
This video is part of an ongoing series, Codex Machina, that processes cycles of hardship, conflict, and mythology through the fractured lens of history and the AI age. A meditation on memory, suffering, and the blurred line between the sacred and the synthetic, the series evokes the compositions and allegories of medieval and Renaissance painting. It reflects both personal challenges with physical fragility and the mounting crises of global conflict and encroaching fascism in the present, while merging digital artifacts with the weight of history. Each vignette captures a liminal space where these forces variously converge, inviting the viewer to question the evolving roles of struggle, agency, and wisdom in an age of artificial intelligence.
As part of my ongoing exploration of surreal hauntings and fragile realities, Codex Machina extends the thematic core of my work. Across past collections, I have conjured liminal spaces where history refuses to stay buried, where myths, conflicts, and personal reckonings resurface as spectral echoes. Whether through uncanny dolls, mythic figures, or AI-generated landscapes, my work interrogates cycles of torment, resilience, and transformation. Codex Machina leans into this eerie convergence, allowing the discomfort of these entanglements to surface rather than resolve. It is as much a searching inquiry as it is a meditation—hovering between the mechanical and the human, the coded and the sacred, the forgotten and the ever-returning. Sound design by Barbara Chira.