Deus Ex Machina is about serendipity. I began to see a pattern forming in my life, that serendipity seems to take the wheel so often. That the big important things in life, the thing we derive meaning from, new people, new ideas, are born of serendipity. And what can one do with this new information? Seeking serendipity is slippery of course, so I decided to artificially inject Athens with a bit of it myself.

I was seeing a friend each week who's apartment had four or five €1 bookshops on the way walking. I would often stop in and look at their english books, which is usually a small section. It's always easier to decide when there are fewer choices (I'm an extremely indecisive person). When I wasn't eating meat sometimes there would only be one thing I could eat at a restaurant, it was totally fated, I just ordered the thing I could order, and it was great or bad or so-so, and I accepted it as it was presented to me, however it was.

And so I imagined a bookshop with just one book in it. It could be a book that you'd normally skim by and miss completely, but that maybe held some unknown wonder or truth about life. It being the only book in the whole store, you'd have to look at it thoroughly, out of curiosity if nothing else. When you're on the search for new ideas, choosing from a vast variety of options is a surefire way to fail at finding what you look for. It's the singular object that begs to be investigated. No choice, just an entity presented directly to you.

So I started leaving books around that I found interesting, wrapped as a present, and hanging from a high string. An object that is so out of place on the street, so oddly tantalizing, that it must be the thing you're searching for. The Deus Ex Machina.