The Devil in AI: Christine Armanger’s "de Diaboli" Reports from the Imagination

The AI red herring swims on. But artists like choreographer dance performer Christine Armanger and her cie Louve have it by the back fins.

I guess the AI fraud will become clearer when the market crashes because there just isn’t as much value as all that in a fully-automated appointment confirmation system and no value at all in fake homework and illiterate children.

This not to say that there won’t be people making tons of money on fully-automated war drones – only that thanks to the empty kerfuffle about artificial “intelligence” we won’t be discussing how much these should be automated and who should be responsible for them.

Anyhow, let markets crash and mount the Gatling guns on those fully-automated suckers: that’s what a body gets when they turn the economy over to stock jobbers, culture over to grifters and politics over to paranoid “personalities” with money: ‘Leven-cent cotton, forty-cent meat…

And, while Sam Altman, Elon Musk et alia rip down each other’s fevered metaverses, thank the lucky stars and rejoice for the work of Armanger, her troupe, cie Louve (“She-wolf” dance performance company), and, in general, for the work of artists of every kind and stripe.

Thanks, lucky stars, first, for artists who try to make sense of life and amuse even here in this O.K. Corral of a socio-cultural situation so-called “Sapiens” has patched up and then for those artists who actually manage to make a bit of sense.

Armanger’s recently premiered dance performance De Diaboli (“About Devils”) is not only a dramatic success, it’s a pedagogic one.

Also, beyond a limpid choreography and a truly entrancing movement performance by the troupe, there’s a certain air of elegant nuance in it, the kind of elegance that suggests that Armanger may sometimes swot away at print books that have no immediate point, that only might only someday, accidentally, come in handy, especially, at work. That’s good.

Since so much of AI is about show and not tell, first about the visual elegance and compacted nous of De Diaboli. Basically, De Diaboli shows or suggests everything there is to know about devils without ever suggesting there’s anything more in them than “what we see is what we get”: The Devil is in the spectator and the performance space, not in the air and shadows.

A black heap unfolds in the unlighted space at the center of three rows of spectators, some of whom have previously submitted certain types of personal information for use during the performance.

Suspended in a swollen hum, long, hooved, well-shaped haunches and fetlocks poke out, then hands and arms, then three bodies take shape, then heads spring into place.

One shape moves out from the heap, uses a black tape to cut out a (magic) circle.

Within the circle, the behooved-three can prance, admire and show themselves firm on their sturdy (?), fleet (?) goat (?) legs.

At least, spectators like me suppose these three are devils. De Diaboli is about devils. Devils have goat-like legs, hooves, strong as bears, fast as lightning.

This sounds peculiar, but it is at this point that I begin to wonder, to think this performance is about doing, even cosplaying, devilry rather than about devils.

My attention has somehow been drawn to the costuming expertise I see involved in fitting the “goat” legs.

Cie Louve’s technical solution is to dissimulate the ankle in the hooved shank in such a way that the dance performer is able to put their foot flat in the moments when performance doesn’t call for it. Very considerate of the performers’ comfort, at the same time it points the performative quality of “devil” over the quality of devil or devilishness.

The upshot is that, for me anyhow, the main visual identifier of De Diaboli “about devils” is “artifice” – in all the concurrent three senses of the word: skillful work, resourceful solution, trick.

And, ‘though those hooved shanks have likely been whipped up by De Diaboli costumer Marjolaine Mansot (who also seems to have helped the performers get up and around on them elegantly) somewhere in France and the lines of code for ChatGPT or a suicide drone on the Donbas front likely originally and lugubriously stitched together by underpaid screen-tanned nerds in San José, CA, USA, both the shanks and the code are artifice. Neither are miracles.

Artifice. Miracles.

So, by the time the elegant Diaboli have finished their sway and display, I’m thinking that devils are not about sleight of hand, nor an avatar for Evil nor for what those 20th century novelists and psychologists called the “sex impulse”. The devils of AI may cackle and mutter like Sam Altman quarrelling with Elon Musk over the share-out of the swag. They might chillingly conspire. They could be the menacing demon from the Exorcist. Or HAL 9000. But these Diaboli aren’t that theatrical devil stuff at all.

What these AI devils are, and this is the real point, is troubling. Not menacing. Troubling in exactly the same way that seeing a performer with hooved shanks is troubling, not demonic.

If a body’s vision is troubled, they squint and focus – if they are compos mentis or trying to manipulate, anyhow, they don’t cry, “The devil done it!”.

And, if what a body sees is troubling, unfamiliar, different, improbable, clearing things up doesn’t…

And just as I’m looking at the elegant Diaboli and thinking “doesn’t”, from just around some corner, comes a robot dog into the visual frame.

And, in the same house-pet manner that belongs to my plate-like Roomba™ autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner, effectively an AI, this robot dog puts a spell on me, on spectators.

And it comes to me what the devil in AI is. It is being born a human being. It is surprise. It is reflex. And, maybe, no. Certainly, it’s somebody trying to distract my attention from what’s important to know both about myself and AI.

The little robot dog does not move well, but I am surprised it does so at all.

And with its suggestive shape and theatrical “dog traits” – “sniffing” the air or “cocking” the “head” – the part that goes “forward” – much like the tapping and brushing functions of my plate-like Roomba™ suggest to me a cute “kitten” that is feeling out an opening or toying with something.

I am inclined to be charmed by the process of “understanding” the robot dog, to lend the thing familiar qualities, to “interpret it in” to my perceived environment.

But, unlike my Roomba™ “kitten”, the de Diaboli “dog” is made “magical” – devilish! – when it “reveals” knowledge of the people in the audience (who, remember, have signed up and submitted the information that enables the dog to “recognize” them).

“Interpreting in” movement is a reflex. It happens almost continuously as a body decides that for instance the shape moving toward them is another person, not a goat and not a threat. The differential gears involved in the reflex – culture, existing beliefs, perceptive apparatus and cognition – are the details that the devils get in to.

On a day to day basis, the simplest thing a body can do is to accept the reflex and the differentials involved in it. With the dog robot – with AI-associated stuff in general, a body is disposed to cry out, just as in that old Frankenstein movie, “It’s Alive, It’s Alive”.

Since, as with milk and soy milk, there’s a lot of money riding on confounding artificial intelligence as “intelligence” or facial recognition as “recognition” all that entails, there’s a lot of pressure in the air to keep the water muddy. Also, in their different ways the “poets, priests and politicians” of the current patriarchy that have words to thank for their positions all make a profit from imagining devils where there are only people and artifice.

I left De Diaboli remembering that “reflex” doesn’t mean “fate”, it means reflex.

De Diaboli inspires me to take a tip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave deactivates HAL 9000 and gets a whole new world.

I saw De Diaboli by Christine Armanger (cie Louve) on 6 February 2026 at Atelier de Paris as part of the Faits d’hiver 2026 dance performance program sponsored by Micadanses, with conception, choreography and text by Christine Armanger (Cie Louve) and performed by Suzanne Henry, Clémentine Vanlerberghe, Christine Armanger, direction and lighting by Thomas Cany, sound and set by Foucault de Malet, Creative Technology by Martin Tricaudin, dramaturgy and costumes by Marjolaine Mansot with music L’Île Re-sonante by Eliane Radigue, communications by July Bohico and distribution by Emilie Briglia

Performance note, “De Diaboli”, Atelier de Paris, Thursday, 5 and 6 February 2026

From Greek διάβολος (diabolos), the “Devil” is the power that disunites, fractures. Christine Armanger raises the question of the new faces of the Devil, as emblem of possession or transformation and manipulation. Bringing together three performers as chimeras, di Diaboli dresses up in medieval costume to explore our contemporary cultures. On the ashes of a fire around which a dance of three ends up as trance, a robot dog piloted by AI and capable of facial recognition appears. It is an eminent demonic figure of the future. A theatre of connivance, flirt and trap tightens around the digital demon in a confusing ritual where dance becomes incantation and the stage a mirror which shows us the power of illusion and our own ability to resist it. Click on the link for the original note just below.

De dIAboli [Compagnie Louve]: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1193296339651944

Christine Armanger, [Compagnie Louve], De dIAboli: https://www.atelierdeparis.org/a-l-affiche/christine-armanger/

Christine Armanger, cie Louve: https://www.compagnielouve.fr

L’Île Re-sonante by Eliane Radigue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfz_kIU3KTE

“Fully-automated war drones”. I suppose my friends might find me sounding a little cynical. My mother used to warn me about it. But then, well. I’m glad that Ukraine will shortly win its liberation war, for example, thanks to fully-automated war drones: Paul Warburg, Ukraine Just Launched an INCREDIBLE New Strategy Against Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCwaQh_hwyA

“Paranoid personalities with money: ‘Leven-cent cotton, forty-cent meat…”. As we say: le plus que ça change… ‘Leven-cent cotton, forty-cent meat, American folk song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUnaqoLvcBs

“O.K. Corral”. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957): “Starring Burt Lancaster & Kirk Douglas in Technicolor Epic: Two titans of the silver screen unite for the ultimate showdown! Burt Lancaster is the stoic lawman Wyatt Earp, and Kirk Douglas is the volatile, deadly Doc Holliday. The Plot: Lawman Wyatt Earp and troubled gambler Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance as they travel to Tombstone, Arizona. There, they must face off against the ruthless Clanton gang in the most famous gunfight in the history of the Old West”: https://m.ok.ru/video/10606842940057

“Suspended in a swollen hum”: L’Île Re-sonante by Eliane Radigue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfz_kIU3KTE

“The little robot dog does not move well”. Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”: https://www.samueljohnson.com/dogwalk.html

“Artifice”: 1. Deceptive Trickery: “Pretending to faint was merely an artifice to get attention”. 2. Clever Stratagem: “The spy used a clever artifice to gain access to the building”. 3. Skillful Workmanship: “The sculpture is a masterpiece of artistic artifice”.

“Menacing demon”. The Exorcist (1973): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqx6fy

“HAL 9000”. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Dave Deactivates HAL 9000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS3h1bxmVR4

“It’s Alive, It’s Alive”. Frankenstein (1931): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qNeGSJaQ9Q

“Poets, priests and politicians” : The Police - De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da (Official Music Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v2GDbEmjGE