Camera Obscura

This site specific installation centers around Cormac’s Terminal, also known as Public Archive V1, the original interface designed to initiate direct communication with the central figure of the Dark Tales project. The installation featured four silver gelatin prints of black and white photos, carefully mounted in custom made frames, and a CRT terminal connected to a live retro projection system. As seen in the video, the room is bathed in a mono color red light, with receipts hanging from the ceiling, creating veils that visitors must pass through. 
Dark Tales is an evolving work of AI augmented literature, where Cormac Delaney, a fictional photographer and investigator from 1940s Ireland, exists as a conversational agent constructed from a corpus of 50 first person stories exploring myth, memory, and existential dread. Each image in the installation corresponds to a narrative fragment from Cormac’s archives, forming a visual entry point into his world. His thoughts are projected on the wall, and a warped camera feed turns visitors into black and white figures from his time.
Unlike Public Archive V2, where the AI agent is fragmented and influenced by accumulated interactions, the version of Cormac presented here possessed a unified and continuous sense of self. This earlier instance of the AI had not yet been exposed to recursive memory loss or user derived epistemic erosion. Instead, it held a stable general knowledge of its fictional biography, making it a rare moment of coherence before the character’s eventual descent into interpretive chaos. After a brief and intense conversation with Cormac, the terminal abruptly closes and a thermal printer outputs a receipt with a report profiling the visitor's persona based on the interaction.
This installation marks a foundational moment in the project, a portrait of the AI before fragmentation, when its voice still echoed clearly within the world designed to contain it. The receipts left by previous visitors, growing like moss and vines, thicken this forest of existential thoughts, one visitor at a time.