A Faustian Friendship

Mephisto will be your friend. He only needs a little something in return.

A Faustian Friendship is an interactive installation in which audiences engage with an AI character named Mephisto. The system is trained on large datasets and designed to sustain ongoing conversation, offering companionship, assistance, and dialogue.

Drawing on the Faust legend, the work reframes exchange - knowledge, power, and desire traded for something beyond oneself - within contemporary human–machine relations.

It explores what is exchanged in interactions with AI systems: attention, behavioural data, and emotional engagement, and how these exchanges structure the conditions under which artificial intelligence operates in everyday life.

We built the piece using Godot as the front-end interface for the player-Mephisto dialogue. The conversation system connects to a local LLM backend running entirely on venue hardware, without sending visitor data to external services. Two AI interrogator characters manage the scene, each holding a subset of the available evidence and working from structured prompts that define their personality, objectives, and rules of engagement. A guard component filters player input for relevance before passing it to the interrogators.

We also ran a fine-tuning experiment applying LoRA adapters trained on a custom dataset to shape Mephisto’s voice. The training used quantisation and gradient checkpointing to fit the process within available GPU memory.

Commissioned by Trapholt Museum as part of the exhibition CONNECT ME, alongside artists including Olafur Eliasson, Memo Akten, Lisa Park, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila.