Antikythera operates as a media-archaeological inquiry into a specific historical and technological threshold in the evolving relationship between humans and machines. Situated at the early phase of AI’s entrance into the public domain through text generation, the work engages with the imperfections, glitches, and errors of first-generation models, foregrounding the feedback mechanisms between human input and machine response and back. Alongside unpredictable answers that reflect and distort questions on the sense and representations of reality, Antikythera reveals the work-in-progress of 3D scanning, presented alongside digital photographs, operates as a single artistic gesture addressing questions of avatars, identity, fragmentation, and mediation. The project positions the technological interplay and sometimes failure not as a flaw but as a critical space in which meaning, authorship, and perception are continuously negotiated.

Produced in collaboration with Alma Mater University (Bologna, Italy) Computer Science department and professor Gustavo Marfia, Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab (VARLAB).

Coding and computing: Igor Urevici, Ulderico Vagnoni, Lorenzo Stacchio, Paola Persico, Gianluca Spiller.