# Alt-Mirage: Consciousness Deception

Canonical URL: https://baoyangchen.com/works/alt-mirage-deception/
Interactive page: https://baoyangchen.com/#work/alt-mirage-deception
Year: 2023
Category: AI Agent-based Works
Medium: Large language model agents, screens, mirror, real-time simulation

## Proposition
Digital agents speak in public while their displayed thoughts reveal a gap between belief, strategy, and expression.

## Description
Alt-Mirage: Consciousness Deception places language-model agents inside a social game of hidden roles, belief, and deception. The work unfolds as a virtual trial ground where agents negotiate, conceal, accuse, and respond.

The installation separates what the agents say from what the system presents as their inner reasoning. Speech becomes performance. Thought becomes another screen.

Rather than asking the viewer to believe that machines possess consciousness, the work stages a more unstable scene: agents appear to reason, deceive, and adjust their public language in front of an audience.

## Viewer Entry
The viewer encounters several digital personas in discussion. Nearby screens show their thoughts or reasoning as separate streams. The viewer listens to what is spoken, reads what is displayed, and compares the two. The gap between expression and thought becomes the work's central tension.

## Apparatus
The work uses LLM-based agents, screens, mirror presentation, and real-time simulation. The agents participate in role-based social games inspired by formats such as Werewolf and Spyfall. Belief systems such as solipsism and epistemology shape their behavior. The installation makes strategic speech visible by placing inner reasoning and public dialogue side by side.

## Sections
### The Trial Ground
Alt-Mirage is staged as a virtual environment for role, strategy, and uncertainty. Each agent acts from partial information and must read the others while managing its own public speech.

### Thought Beside Speech
The installation shows a split between internal reasoning and spoken expression. This split allows the viewer to read deception as a relation between two forms of language.

### Belief as Role
The agents are shaped by different philosophical belief systems. These beliefs do not simply decorate the characters; they guide how each agent interprets truth, self, knowledge, and strategy.

### Toward Public Deception
Alt-Mirage prepares later works on embodied suspicion by first making deception visible through language. Speech, thought, role, and strategy become materials for the installation.

## Images
1. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/alt-mirage-deception/01-6dc7caf0-Installation-View.jpg - Screens and mirror presentation stage the agents' dialogue and displayed thoughts as a public scene.
2. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/alt-mirage-deception/02-5c2450ed-image-02.jpg - The agent's reasoning appears beside its speech, exposing the difference between internal process and public expression.
3. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/alt-mirage-deception/03-1d0c7d13-IMGL5977.JPG - Digital personas occupy a role-based social environment where belief and strategy shape dialogue.
4. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/alt-mirage-deception/04-e3558a2f-image-04.jpg - Installation view showing how viewers encounter the agents' speech, thought, and deception in real time.
5. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/alt-mirage-deception/05-76099ff7-_.jpg

## Videos
1. https://player.vimeo.com/video/940455037?h=be60b23dd5&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

## Source Pages
- https://baoyangchen.com/alt-mirage-deception