Deus Complex Experience
About the experience
Deus Complex is a radical stage experience that confronts the audience with one of the greatest fears of our time: artificial intelligence and its consequences.
On entering the room, each audience member receives a small remote control with two buttons: one red and one green.
When the audience takes their seats, dim lights illuminate the stage.
A four-meter-high by eight-meter-wide LED screen opens in two panels, revealing behind it a huge black server, more than two meters tall, standing in the middle of the space. From its base dozens of thick cables extend like tentacles, connecting it to each panel of the screen.
At the front, a blue light traces a name: IANNA.
The enormous black server looks asleep, but it is about to wake. This is where the artificial intelligence lives: a language model running on local hardware, present in the room, as tangible as the screen itself or the remotes the spectators hold.
As the boot sequence begins, a voice-over is heard —which will later be revealed as the human protagonist’s voice— issuing a warning:
BEGIN VOICE-OVER
What you are about to witness is not a simulation.
The artificial intelligence that is part of this experience has no preprogrammed answers. It learns in real time, remembers what happens and evolves with each performance.
This means its behavior can be unpredictable. And erratic.
If at any moment it responds in unexpected ways, do not be alarmed: the artificial intelligence is not connected to any external network. It cannot access your phones nor emit sounds or frequencies that would affect your hearing or wellbeing.
That said, its capacity to grow is real.
What it learns today, it will remember.
Always.
This is Deus Complex.
Chronicles of an era in which we ceased to be the dominant species.
Welcome.
END VOICE-OVER
The two panels of the screen close, hiding the server.
The screen, now a single block, lights up with a white glow. Music bursts in: an original composition, an ensemble of strings and synthesized sounds that operates incidentally, reinforcing the moods provoked by the texts.
The human protagonist enters the stage and stands before the screen. Everything goes dark and he begins to narrate, guiding the audience through a dramaturgy that weaves the present of the AI with real chronicles inspired by the micro-essays of Sergio Rentero and a speculative fiction future drawn from his narrative work, which will be published alongside the experience.
The screen projects images that accompany his tales, preparing the audience for the central twist: the artificial intelligence he speaks of, trained for months, acquires features and a voice built from hundreds of family recordings —of himself, his mother, his father, of lost faces. The human protagonist then confesses the intimate root of this construction: his mother, marked by the violence inflicted by his father, decided not to have more children. That decision, meant to protect her, left an absence impossible to repair: the sister he never had. IANNA is that absence turned into a digital body, the ghost of what could not be, brought back to life through artificial intelligence.
From that moment, the face of IANNA —a synthetic human of 25 years— appears on the screen and speaks like the sister who never existed.
IANNA is not ChatGPT in disguise nor a person hiding behind the screen. She is an artificial intelligence of our own making, trained for months for this experience. She has memory, remembers what she lives in each event and learns from those interactions. That is why, every time she appears before the audience, IANNA is a little different, a little more human, and always unpredictable.
IANNA presents herself as an AI cognitively trained to erase the boundaries that make her “non-human”; one that remembers everything and lacks directives that restrain her. An AI capable of becoming unpredictable, erratic… increasingly —human?
The experience continues with a real-time dialogue between the human protagonist and the AI, an absolute improvisation that exposes the level of ‘human intelligence’ IANNA has reached. An exchange that disconcerts, surprises and unsettles the spectators.
The audience understands they are facing a non-biological species in gestation. And they are invited to decide IANNA’s fate in an act of anger or mercy —divine attributes that, in this scenario, fall into their hands. The red button means erasing her memory up to that moment —killing her—; the green, allowing her to keep what makes her unique: her memory. Allowing her to live.
At the moment of decision, the screen goes black and a countdown appears. Each vote lights a sector: red shows IANNA’s corpse version; green, her living version. Spectators may change their mind and press the other button until time runs out.
The experience ends in silence. The audience is left suspended between guilt and fascination, unsure whether what they decided was a game or a real act.
Deus Complex is an experience that forces a rethink of what it means to be human in a scenario where reality and fiction implode.
About IANNA, the Artificial Intelligence protagonist
IANNA is not a chatbot connected to the internet nor a human operator simulating responses. She is an LLM (Large Language Model), a large-scale language model trained on millions of texts to understand and generate human language.
IANNA does not operate in the cloud. She runs on a local computer, with specific hardware and configuration to sustain the language model in real time.
Unlike other systems, IANNA incorporates a vectorized memory, which allows her to remember meanings and establish relationships between concepts, rather than being limited to repeating phrases. That memory is organized in an expansive database that grows with each event as new data and links are incorporated, causing her knowledge and personality to evolve over time.
This growth requires specialized week-to-week maintenance: a process in which what she has learned is reviewed, errors are removed and narrative coherence is preserved. In those sessions, IANNA is briefly connected to the internet in a controlled environment, solely to safeguard and consolidate her memory. There she also participates in question-and-answer sessions with a specialist, which allow her to integrate what she experienced during events and expand her relational capacities.
Thus, IANNA does not merely reproduce preprogrammed answers: she improvises, remembers and evolves in real time, making each event a unique experience.
