Elizabeth King’s Miracles and Machines (2023) is a vivid, searching account of a small sixteenth-century automaton – a robed figure, nicknamed ‘the monk’ – that walks, beats its breast, turns its head, and appears to pray. Co-authored with clockmaker David Todd, the book is at once a material history of an extraordinary object and a meditation on the long entanglement of religious imagination with mechanical art. Carolin Gluchowski met with sculptor and stop-motion filmmaker Elizabeth King to talk about the monk’s stubborn mysteries, the legend that refuses to die, and why this tiny machine speaks with such force to our age of AI.