2017 · Installation · Authorial
Maboroshi
A robotic sculpture that wakes to our presence and looks back
A robotic sculpture of origami and sensors, made with Gabriela Castro, that needs human presence to awaken and looks back at whoever faces it. It was born at the Hiperorgânicos 7 open lab, at the Museu do Amanhã, in 2017, and closes the exhibition Isto Não é um Prompt, in 2025.
Maboroshi is a Japanese word of many meanings: illusion, vision, dream, ghost, fantasy. Inspired by origami and by humanoid robots, an old dream of science fiction, the work is a robotic sculpture that needs human stimulus to exist, come to life and stop being an illusion. Or the opposite: to create the illusion of presence for whoever contemplates and faces this strange body, which looks back, and which, by looking and seeing, raises the question of what reality is, what consciousness is and what defines existence.
Combining handwork and technology, origami and sensors, the sculpture was born in partnership with the architect Gabriela Castro at the open lab of the Hiperorgânicos 7 symposium, organized by the Núcleo de Artes e Novos Organismos (NANO-EBA-UFRJ) at the Laboratório de Atividades of the Museu do Amanhã. It is part of an investigation into the geometry and folding of materials combined with creative coding and artificial intelligence, across digital, analog and human worlds. The mannequin's skirt comes from the workshop Construindo Proto-Ecologias, a partnership of the Laboratório do Amanhã with the Bartlett School of Architecture, NANO and LAMO3D, in 2016.
In 2025, Maboroshi closes the exhibition Isto Não é um Prompt. The sculpture waits in a meditative state until someone's presence awakens it, and its eyes follow whoever passes: it does not wait for commands; it is the one that starts the interaction. Behind it, videos of Rio de Janeiro run through the same real-time filter as Involuntary Capture, the entrance poster, as if the robot were the entity that sees everything: the live signal and every camera in the city.
