deus ex machina: Hipólito/Sinécdoque

LED sculpture
2026

Deus Ex Machina is part of Hippolytus/Synecdoche, my MFA thesis project. The work reconfigures the deus ex machina of ancient Greek theater (a mechanical device that used pulleys to suspend an actor representing a god and resolve the dramatic conflict). Instead of revealing a divinity, this contemporary machine suspends a technological body somewhere between the human and the divine.

The sculpture consists of 26 LED panels assembled into a suspended metal structure and controlled by three programmed Raspberry Pi computers. Across its fragmented screens appears the inverted body of Hippolytus in the final moments of his life. The fragmentation of the image transforms the body into a synecdoche: a part that evokes an absent whole, suspended between presence and absence, agony and ecstasy, life and death.

The work creates a tension between technology and divinity. The LED screens, code, and suspension system become a contemporary mechanism of apparition. Like the ancient theatrical machine, technology produces the presence of something that seems to exist beyond the human, while the algorithm operates almost as an invocation, a sequence of instructions that calls an image into existence.