Faust is not dead, but AI is. Faust Shop 2.0 transposes two scenes from Goethe’s Faust into an imagined AI Winter, using the possible collapse of today’s AI hype as a space to reconsider our relationship with machine learning.

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As AR Director, I developed an augmented reality experience situated within a public library, where participants encounter themselves through a virtual AI mask. The work uses AR scenography and interaction design to examine how digital technologies reorganise bodies, attention and social relations in public space. Through the smartphone camera, the openness of the library is reframed by an algorithmically mediated field of vision. The phone becomes a mobile proscenium: a portable stage through which physical space, digital imagery and the participant’s body are continually recomposed.

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Credits: Produced by Cambridge Digital Humanities; Co-Direction and Co-production: Annja Neumann & Alex Mentzel; Script: Alex Mentzel, Annja Neumann, David Constantine (translator), Johann Wolfgang Goethe; Projection, Stage Manager, Sound Operator: Peter Baker, Digital Director and software engineer of the Faust Shop bot AI: Riza Moola; Augmented Reality Director: Jing Wang Thomas; Digital Designer: Amaia Robertson Nogues