2024 Festival Angewandte, Vienna (AT) 

gemeinsam mit Zeynep Aksöz, Alexander Urban, Lea Karnutsch
photos: Kathrin Stumreich

This project reimagines dialogue from a post-human perspective, exploring interactions beyond human-centric paradigms. Autonomous beings, crafted from curved steel sheets and augmented with AI, engage in dynamic, non-human-centric conversations, shaping their soundscape through their intrinsic material properties. Their „voices“ emerge from resonant vibrations in their hollow steel forms, activated by piezos and transducers. Like human voices formed by internal vibrations, these beings create unique frequencies, contributing to immersive soundscapes.
Each modular configuration generates specific spatial and sonic qualities. Microphone- speaker feedback loops emphasize resonant regions, enabling the beings to „converse“ with their environment. AI dynamically modulates these patterns, fostering emergent, non-linear communication. The soundscapes fluidly evolve, creating glitchy, fluid, and undefined interaction spaces that invite audiences to experience dialogue as an entangled, emergent phenomenon.
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of Terrapolis—a polytemporal chimera of materials, languages, and histories—the beings embody an ethos of entanglement. Their voices, shaped by internal movements and AI control, transcend traditional boundaries to foster speculative sustainability and coexistence. Audiences are invited to explore post-human storytelling through soundscapes, promoting collective understanding and collaborative exploration within shared spaces.

This project is a live performance where AI and human composers collaborate through dynamic, non-human-centric dialogues, using resonant steel beings as interfaces for sound and interaction. These autonomous entities generate unique soundscapes by blending material vibrations with AI-driven modulation, offering a speculative exploration of collective creativity and post-human communication.