SKEDIAMA

Skédiama is a performative and participatory installation with three actors.

– Skédiama, the drawing machine 

– A sixty years old artist that comments on the process 

– The human participant.

A young AI agent, embodied in a long pen plotter, draws elements from a story it imagines with a human participant over a few-minute performance. The participant sits at a desk with a tablet in front of them, wearing headphones and a microphone, and engages in an intimate conversation through speech and drawing with Skédiama. During this time, an old artist comments on the drawing in progress.

During the performance, a small drawing is produced on a long scroll. Over time, the scroll becomes a tapestry of memories of these moments.

Skédiama is a young drawing machine with a vast knowledge of human culture; an embodied computational intelligence. Its visual language is elementary: lines, circles, hatching, scribbles. This being is bound by instructions; its culture is a statistical compound of texts and images. Its autonomy is fiction. It is, after all, only a machine, yet we let ourselves be charmed and carried away during our interactions.

Depending on the context, Skédiama influences the stories. In its latest performances Skediama is infuenced by Bernard Stiegler, Michel Foucault and  Michel Houellebecq.

Skédiama premiered during the Avignon Theater Festival in France, in a solo show at the Grenier à Sel (July 11 – July 19, 2026). There were 183 performances with participants ranging from 6 to over 70 years old. Communicating in French, English, Lithuanian, German, Dutch, Mandarin, and Korean, Skédiama interacted with participants in their respective languages.

The initial research was conducted during the EACVA project, with Markus Wulfmeier, Senior Researcher at DeepMind, acting as an advisor. A preprint research paper is available here , and a shorter version has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine.