Site-specific concert-installation for multi-channel sound (24-channel loudspeaker array, 8 subwoofers, 16 SubPac body-transducers), 5-channel video, and light. 

In collaboration with Alan Segal and Victor Shepardson

Deviant Chain (2019) is a multimedia work of speculative fiction that proposes a
constructed language — a conlang — as a potential cognitive interface for
human-AI-interaction. Through sound, moving image, typography, and fragmentary exposition,
the work portrays a future in which humans and computational systems have become
irreversibly enmeshed through the shared use of an incomprehensible and idiosyncratic
machine-generated language. From the persistent garbled phonetics heard from a disembodied
voice throughout the work, to glass sculptures of the conlang’s three-dimensional alphabet, to
animated graffiti, to embroidered clothing, to embodied gestures, even to abject transformations
in human physiology, in this speculative fiction all aspects of human life have been transformed
by machinic language. In contrast to the ubiquity of contemporary human-AI interfaces that rely
upon linguistic forms of mediation that implicitly endorse normative and utilitarian
understandings of the world through the use of natural language, the speculative Deviant Chain
conlang proposes an entirely different form of linguistic interface: one which has been generated
by unsupervised machine-learning to create a language better suited to unlocking and
entraining to strange forms of thought and creativity contained within latent space.

Commissioned by Ultima, opened at Gamle Museet for Samtidskunst, Nasjonalmuseet, September 20th, 2019

https://ultima.no/