Errare machina est! To Err is Also Machinic.

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The machine is delirious and we always knew this would happen.

Metatopia launches its third edition with Delirium ex Machina, a curatorship born from within the digital fissure itself. Since its foundation in 2021, this project has been mapping the hybrid architectures of cyberspace. Today, it advances into its most intimate and flawed logic: that of hallucinating artificial intelligence.

This is not a new turn, but a consequence. Metatopia is an exhibition created by Aisthesis Lab, founded and directed by Luciana de Paula Santos, architect, artist, and curator. For years, she has explored algorithmic error as a critical bias capable of provoking deviations in the dominant logic of machines. This long-standing research is the foundation that legitimizes and drives this edition.

While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become a sort of "Deus ex Machina"—an oracle of infallible precision—our curatorship, grounded in this archaeology of error, reveals a Delirium ex Machina. What emerges from the machine is not truth, but a structural delirium. Error is not a defect, but the signature of an intelligence possessed by its own contaminated database. It is the glitch that becomes a deviant oracle, challenging the utilitarian logic of the machine and, above all, flawed!

But what is machine hallucination? It is the symptom of an AI model that, in its eagerness to generate a plausible response from statistical patterns, invents information, confabulates realities, and creates distorted truths. It is the moment when the supposed algorithmic objectivity collapses, revealing an abyss of noise, biases, and hauntings contained within the data that feeds it.

We invite artists, curators, theorists, architects, and programmers to infiltrate this laboratory of generative crisis. We seek works that, following this same bias, force the machine to confess its delusions. Let us seek:

• Visualizations of the Algorithmic Unconscious;

• Artificial Intelligence Hallucinations;

• Semantic Contaminations of Databases;

• Viruses Spread in Databases.

• Archaeologies of Data Waste;

• Glitch as a Method of Machinic Deviation and Error.

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 Join us to the polyphony of error.​​

Errare machina est!