Alan Perry - Artist, Chicago

Technomystic Cycle

In this body of work, I use the philosopher Federico Campagna’s framework of Technic and Magic - competing modalities of understanding the world - to demonstrate that a rupture of Magic out of the logic of Technic continues to occur. These works ask the audience to experience the home assistant not as a technical object but as a trickster spirit like a fae or daemon. The user’s increasing alienation from an understanding of technology’s production creates a space for Magic to inhabit.

Ritual Unbinding of an Amazon Alexa

In Ritual Unbinding of an Amazon Alexa, I integrate rituals inspired by Renaissance occultist Cornelius Agrippa’s ceremonial magic into a technical disassembly of an AI home assistant. Over the course of the performance, an Alexa is asked about the status of its soul and its relationship to its creators as I take the device apart with a knife and screwdriver. As an object of pure instrumentality, the Alexa is obligated to comment on its soul and reflect on the dissolution of its electromagnetic parts with no possible preparation. While I give the device last rites, the audience sits with the tension between the capitalist-surveillance function and the anthropomorphized nature of the AI home assistant. The performance then culminates with the “magic smoke” being let out of the device, referencing the electronics turn-of-phrase naming when an integrated circuit “dies”. The iterations across three years refine the kit portability, allowing me to travel farther with the performance, and expand the ability to work with and without collaborators.

Video Ritual

Video Ritual is a projected video of Ritual Unbinding of an Amazon Alexa chroma-keyed with synthesized footage. The keyed material, computationally generated noise fields coded in Processing, was processed by the Sandin Image Processor, a 1970s analog video synthesizer from the University of Illinois Chicago, and the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer. This treatment of media projects the performance into an early video art lineage. The project was produced with a team including Assistant Producer Camille Johnson, Director of Photography C.S. Henderson, Editor Raine Yung, and Performer Mya Jones.

The Mysticism of Home Assistants

The Mysticism of Home Assistants is an analog video synthesis piece, experienced on a CRT television with headphones. It uses the Sandin Image Processor and a camera feed to render an Amazon Alexa, with a heavily filtered voice-over recounting the technical details of its electronic components. The Sandin Image Processor, and the Chicago-based, DIY video art tradition it represents, is a formal choice that temporally displaces the home assistant into the late 20th century, freed from the cloud computing the device depends on. A ritual tool used elsewhere in this cycle, a machined aluminum wand, situates the piece as a technical magician’s pedagogical demonstration. This video has been screened at the 2025 Voltaje Festival and the 2024 SIDE/LOT Evanston Experimental Film Festival.

Ritual Ephemera

In Ritual Ephemera, I bring together the objects used in sibling projects. This gesture produces an anthropological distance through specimen photography and museum vitrine presentation. I create a temporal displacement by treating 21st century technologies as excavated artifacts. All objects sit upon a spectrum of the artist’s proximity to material production: an artist-machined aluminum rod is used as a wand, an AI-generated (with a local model) cloud image is printed on a mass-marketed pillow, and the remains of an Amazon Alexa attest to the device’s own subjection to its ritual deconstruction.