Dark Tales is Vandalo Ruins’ first gallery solo exhibition in Paris, a follow-up to his 2025 show at Milano Photo Fair. But you would have struggled to feel that context standing outside it last week. The building was already doing something to you before you walked in.

Four television screens filled the gallery windows facing the street. Three of them showed the same thing: distorted digital eyes, staring. The fourth showed a face I was almost certain I recognized: Arthemort.

“There’s Brian on this TV,” I told my friend.

She hesitated.

A few moments later, Vandalo appeared and explained it. A hidden camera watches the window. Pause long enough and it reads you, approximate age, perceived gender, emotional expression, then casts you into one of the stories inside the exhibition. Your portrait surfaces on the screen about thirty seconds later, reinterpreted, absorbed into his universe. You thought you were looking at art. The art was deciding what kind of character you were.

I sat down with him to understand what he was building.

*Portrait of Dubhduine* showing an image output of Olena Yara, courtesy of the artist.

Olena Yara: What tale was Dark Tales trying to tell?

Vandalo Ruins: Dark Tales is about the weight of reality and what happens when fiction begins to carry that weight instead.

Reality is heavy. It comes with responsibilities, consequences, expectations. Fiction feels lighter, a space where we can test ideas without paying the full cost of them. At least that is what we tell ourselves.

But what happens when fiction starts influencing reality? When a story shapes behavior, when a character changes how you think, when a digital ghost begins to feel emotionally present? The boundary becomes unstable. Either reality becomes lighter because we are filtering it through myth, or fiction becomes heavier because we begin treating it as real.

Dark Tales plays inside that tension. It creates a world where fictional characters have operational impact, where narratives collect data, where imagined figures occupy physical spaces. At some point, you stop asking whether something is real or fictional and start asking whether it affects you.

And that is the unsettling part.

If fiction can influence markets, emotions, identity, even the architecture of exhibitions, then it operates well beyond harmless imagination. And if reality begins to look like something that can be edited, filtered, or manifested through narrative, then it loses some of its inevitability.

So the tale Dark Tales is trying to tell is simple but dangerous: if the two realms become interchangeable, do we become freer because we can rewrite parts of reality, or do we become more fragile because everything feels up for revision?

It offers no answer. It tests how much weight fiction can carry before it stops being fiction at all.

*Portrait of Dubhduine* showing an image output of Zhannet Podobed, courtesy of the artist.

Technologically, how does the window installation piece work? And why was it important for you to turn the viewer into a participant?

The installation is called Portraits of Dubhduine. It sits inside Edmund’s cabinet of curiosities as if the televisions themselves were containing a captured paranormal entity on display. Within the fiction, Dubhduine is a phenomenon that preserves echoes of presence. In the exhibition, the screens behave like that entity. They observe, capture, and translate.

Technically, the system has several layers. There is a camera and a detection system that responds to stillness. When someone pauses in front of the window and looks, that attention becomes the trigger. But there is also an element of casting. The system crops into the face and runs an image analysis process, reading perceived gender, approximate age, and emotional expression. Based on those signals, it assigns the visitor to one of the stories within Dark Tales. Some narratives are more common, some rarer. You are photographed, yes, but more precisely you are cast.

So far the installation has produced more than two hundred outputs. Each portrait is stylized and absorbed into the fiction. But the edited images are only part of the goal. They are also raw material, feeding a growing dataset that will later generate a new project, potentially transforming these two-dimensional portraits into something else entirely. The capture functions simultaneously as artwork and archive.

Turning the viewer into a participant was essential because Dark Tales requires active engagement to function. The moment you linger, you cross a threshold. You believe you are studying a cabinet display, and then you realize you have become the subject inside it. The installation makes visible something that usually stays hidden: we are constantly categorized, cast, and translated by systems. Here, that process becomes theatrical and part of the myth.

The technology is simple in structure, but the experience shifts the balance of who is observing whom.

Edmund and Vandalo, courtesy of the artist.

Just inside the entrance, floating inside what looked like a digital cabinet of curiosities, was a three-dimensional brain surrounded by two disembodied eyes. This was Edmund, the curator of the entire show according to the fiction. Vandalo introduced him without irony, then immediately qualified it with a laugh.

Olena Yara: Tell me about Edmund.

Vandalo Ruins: Edmund is the curator of the exhibition. Literally. Ok, let’s say potentially. There are still many improvements needed. (laughs)

The show is called Edmund’s Bazaar because he is the figure who connects everything. He is the gallerist within the fiction, and in this installation he performs that same role in reality. When you sit at the entrance and speak to the floating brain, you are speaking to the entity responsible for framing the works, contextualizing them, and guiding your attention.

The decision to embody the curator came from personal experience. In the early stages of my work, especially during the Séance project, I often felt tension with curators and critics. There were expectations about how technology should be discussed, what tone should be adopted, what seriousness looked like. I frequently had the impression that to be an artist, I had to fit into someone else’s curatorial narrative. Work that fell outside that framing was considered misaligned.

That friction stayed with me. So instead of continuously adapting myself to external frameworks, I asked a different question: what if the curatorial voice could emerge from within the work itself? What if the mediation layer belonged to the same universe as the art? Edmund gave that answer.

Presenting him as a floating brain makes his function explicit. He is cognition. He is the thinking layer of the gallery. He speaks about the works, theorizes about them, frames them. I created a curator who can understand this particular project because he is structurally part of it.

There is irony in that. At a time when there is anxiety about AI replacing professions, I am staging a fictional gallerist who can operate autonomously. I am currently developing features such as facial recognition session IDs that would allow him to recognize returning visitors and maintain long-term memory. I am also integrating IoT systems so that when he discusses a piece, he can physically spotlight it or shift the environment.

This is less an attack on curators than a response to a personal need for alignment. Edmund allows me to build a curatorial structure that grows from the work rather than reshaping the work to fit a structure.

So yes, he is a gag. But he is also a solution. He is the brain of the gallery because I needed a brain that understood this particular universe from the inside.

The main gallery space had the quality of somewhere you lower your voice without being asked. Paintings hung on the walls. Real candles burned, actual flame rather than LED approximations, and the light they gave was uneven and warm in the way that makes a room feel like it has a temperature. It was gloomy without being cold. The kind of atmosphere that asks something of you.

Olena Yara: Please guide me through the oil-on-canvas paintings showcased in the gallery.

Vandalo Ruins: After meeting Edmund at the entrance, the visitor steps into Edmund’s Bazaar, a cabinet of curiosities where he plays gallerist and merchant. He introduces two “artists” exhibited inside his collection, Allison McBride and Cormac Delaney, and the room splits like a deliberate diptych. On the right wall, Edmund presents the haunted oil-on-canvas paintings: portraits seeking patrons for Musashi, Dimitri, and Evelyn. On the left wall, Cormac’s silver gelatin prints are presented as chemical evidence from a Leica witness.

Both sides stress-test mediums we associate with truth and provenance. Oil painting implies an originating hand and an original surface. Silver gelatin implies a negative and a chemical lineage tied to photography’s bond with reality. Yet these images are digitally native and AI-generated, so the truth-making aura of analog processes is intentionally put under pressure. If the medium promises reality, what happens when the origin is synthetic?

The haunted paintings counterbalance Cormac’s singular witnessing narratives. Where Cormac’s photographs circle autonomy, agency, and originality through intimate psychological struggle, Allison’s paintings work on broader archetypal structures of human self-sabotage. The ghosts are staged entities shaped from collective data, incarnations of shared failures given a single identity so they can be confronted. Each ghost is anchored by a post-mortem autobiography, a “soul document,” displayed beside the paintings on small tablet screens.

These paintings are also an experiment in shared curation and responsibility. Each ghost produces 150 outputs over time, autonomously generated, minted, and listed through its own custom smart contract. Some are already live on objkt under the seance.tez profile. Collectors can log in on darktales.xyz, find their NFTs, and send suggestions through a chat terminal. The suggestions are interpreted by an agent system, categorized as positive, negative, or neutral, and routed through structured narrative paths. The influence exists, but it is filtered.

What matters is whether participation is understood as responsibility. To collect is to harbor an archetypal essence. Every suggestion leaves a mark, and over time the 150 outputs are brought back together to reconstruct an identity. Across the room, Cormac’s silver gelatin prints carry the same tension in a different key, carrying the aura of photographic evidence while emerging from a synthetic origin. Together, the two walls force a simple discomfort into view: how much of our trust is borrowed from the medium, and how easily that trust can be redirected into a narrative system.

Closeup of Cormac Terminal, courtesy of the artist.

The final room was behind red velvet curtains, heavy enough that stepping through them felt like a small commitment. Inside, both walls were covered floor-to-ceiling in thread and thermally-printed text: scripts, receipts, fragments. Vandalo handed me a candle and told me to take my time. There was no other way to read it. You had to move through the dark yourself, holding the light close, finding the words one section at a time.

Olena Yara: Why the candlelight?

Vandalo Ruins: It began almost as a practical solution. The final section behind the velvet curtains was intentionally dark because of the projections, but it also held the thermal receipt prints from Cormac’s terminal, and those scripts needed to be read. We needed a light source that could move with the visitor, something that preserved the atmosphere, and candles offered that immediately.

But the moment we introduced real flame, it stopped being merely functional. It added intimacy and a slight sense of danger. It introduced something genuinely alive inside the exhibition, a presence that consumes itself and quietly measures time while you are there. It turned that final room into a kind of cave, where visitors had to carry their own light and reveal the text by searching for it, rather than having it presented to them.

It also connected unexpectedly with the film in that room. In the projected scenes, Cormac’s subconscious, interpreted through the figure of Alu, returns again and again to the image of a candle, especially around the graveyard of his mother. In one moment he carries a candle in a specific holder. In another he is imagined as a human-headed candle, burning away. By coincidence and then by recognition, we ended up using candle holders that matched the ones on screen. So visitors were literally holding the same object that exists inside the story world, moving through the dark with it.

What started as a lighting fix became a narrative bridge. It made the space feel less like a gallery and more like a ritual the visitor had to complete.

On the far wall, a video projection ran, scenes from Cormac’s subconscious, strange and unhurried. Nearby, a computer terminal sat open. Visitors could type into it and receive a response, a reply in character, from inside the fiction.

Outputs from Cormac’s terminal, courtesy of the artist.

Olena Yara: Why was AI essential to this exhibition? What narrative were you building through it?

Vandalo Ruins: AI was essential because the exhibition is about staging a world where authorship, evidence, and identity are unstable, where images behave less like finished objects and more like symptoms of a living narrative system.

Dark Tales starts as literature, but it is literature that can run. AI allows the story to produce artefacts autonomously, at a scale and with a consistency of voice that would be impossible if everything required traditional hand-authoring. It lets characters generate their own traces, as the kind of evidence a fictional world would leave behind if it were real.

That matters because the exhibition is built on mediums that historically claim truth. Bringing AI-generated images into those analog truth-machines creates a deliberate contradiction. The viewer feels the pull of authenticity while confronting an origin that is synthetic, and that tension becomes part of the narrative. The question shifts from “is it real?” to “what do you do when reality is performed convincingly enough to demand belief?”

Narratively, AI also makes the work participatory in a way that goes beyond decoration. The entities in Dark Tales are agents. They can produce, adapt, and respond over time. Collectors acquire objects and simultaneously leave traces that can shape future outputs and even future characters. Suggestions, wallet histories, patterns of attention, recurring themes: these become material that the system metabolizes into new ghosts, new photographs, new story pressure. The exhibition builds a narrative about responsibility. If your attention can shape a fragile identity, then looking carries weight. Participation has consequences, and collecting becomes a form of stewardship.

So the narrative being built through AI is a narrative about modern belief systems. About how we outsource judgment to mediums, to institutions, to interfaces, and now to generative systems. About how easily a world can be made coherent enough to hold us. And about the mirror that follows from that: if these characters feel alive, it is because they are built from patterns already inside us.

AI is the mechanism that makes that mirror move.