BUILDING THE STRANGE CHOIR (Creative Futures Counterstructures Workshop)
As part of TIAT and Mozilla’s Creative Futures Counterstructures program, artist-in-residence Halim Madi will lead a workshop at the edge of creativity, data, and AI aesthetics.
This is not a workshop about AI. It’s a workshop about mirrors, and what happens when the reflection stutters. Together we will experiment with plagiarism as ars poetica, with writing as data, and with the strange intimacy of stolen, remixed, and re-voiced text.
In this workshop, we will…
Collect and share unusual “datasets” of text (from scam emails to cringe diaries to one-star reviews of the Great Wall of China).
Train these fragments into new strange voices, moving from the individual to the collective.
Explore plagiarism and piracy as creative strategies, thinking about the “choir” as a metaphor for writing with and through others.
Embody the chorister’s voice, and give it a body through performance.
We’ll leave the workshop with…
A dataset you’ve assembled and played with.
A set of strange generated algorithmic voices that remix your chosen texts.
A collective performance, a strange choir, that we’ve built and sung into being together.
How to prepare:
Bring with you a small body of weird text eg. anything unsettling, funny, broken, or banal. This could be a handful of YouTube comments, your spam folder, old to-do lists, bad translations, receipts, weather reports, or any text that makes you pause. Think of it as material to feed into the choir.
About the artist
Halim Madi حليم ماضي (he/him) was born in Beirut, Lebanon. He lives and works in San Francisco, Beirut, and Paris. A programmer, poet, and present-day storyteller حكواتي, Halim embodies and studies migrant and cyborg consciousnesses and their ability to weave new understandings from conflicting worldscapes. He collects and performs tales of border-crossing bodies, syncretic glitches, métis outsiders, and sites of transformation who hold keys to a different futuring.
About the program
The Creative Futures Counterstructures residency is a 10-week program brought to you by TIAT and the Mozilla Foundation, where artists and technologists explore alternative approaches to AI and culture. Each week, public programming opens a window into the residents’ process, sharing tools, ideas, and works-in-progress with the community. Learn more →