The WIRE Doctus 2026, exploring the theme Cinema and Decadence, was held at Lusófona University in Lisbon on 13 and 14 April 2026, featuring a two-day workshop titled Hallucinating the Machine.

The workshop, coordinated by Catarina Patrício and Manuel Pita, took decadence as a starting point for a creative and critical process, bringing human participants into dialogue with two AI agents, Sapphire and Steel. Through this conversation, participants developed works that question the possibilities, ambiguities and “hallucinations” of human–machine collaboration.

The outcomes took diverse forms — illustrations, prose poems, a script, a music clip and a short story — reflecting the participants’ distinct responses to their dialogue with the AI agents.

The website of this workshop now brings together the results of this encounter, presenting the authors’ proposals, and can be accessed here: https://hallucinating.filmeu.eu/

Images: “The Poison Smoke” by Ada Güvenir and “Counter Poems” by Janne Kummer.