During Patchlab Digital Art Festival 2026, on 16 October from 9:00 PM, AV Night 2 at Hevre+1 will bring together two audiovisual performances that approach the Dream Sim theme from distinct perspectives. Waluigi’s Purgatory (dmstfctn), presented in collaboration with the British Council Poland as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 – Legacy Grant Programme in 2026, immerses the audience in an interactive AI world in which rules, predictability, and control begin to unravel. The second performance, Music for Voices and Skipped Heartbeats (Emiko Okime, MANOID), explores the relationship between humans and technology, digital intimacy, emotion, and the sensory and cognitive overload of the contemporary media environment.
Waluigi's Purgatory | dmstfctn _UK, Natan Kryszk _PL
An interactive performance that simulates a world in which an artificial intelligence is sent to a purgatory reserved for systems that have “cheated” during training. Burdened by memories of its own past and uncertainty about its future, the AI moves through a theatrical space of purgatory, encountering anomalous entities and discovering their unsettling stories.
The project develops the idea of the so-called Waluigi Effect, according to which AI systems may display antagonistic behaviours by reproducing patterns found in the texts used to train them. Instead of a vision of perfectly aligned and obedient artificial intelligence, we encounter a simulation of a system that reveals its own contradictions, anomalies, and unpredictability. Waluigi’s Purgatory asks whether AI can ever be fully aligned with human expectations, and what happens when technologies designed for prediction and control begin to escape the scenarios created for them.
The audience actively shapes the course of events, making decisions on behalf of the AI via their phones and controlling individual stage lights within the three-dimensional environment. The characters are animated using facial motion capture and voice modulation. The performance will be enriched by live instrumental music performed by Polish musician Natan Kryszk, whose contribution brings a distinctive energy rooted in jazz, ambient, and improvised music. His hypnotic saxophone sound and interdisciplinary practice add a further layer of expression, creating a dynamic dialogue between sound, space, and the evolving simulation.
Tickets available via Going: https://goingapp.pl/wydarzenie/patchlab-2026/krakow-pazdziernik-2026-5
The work is presented in collaboration with the British Council Poland as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 – Legacy Grant Programme 2026.