Bring the strange that you were (2025)
Bring the strange that you were was a 6-hour performance where as Terra I recited a 44 minute loop of AI generated text from a model custom trained on Irish mythology and documents accumulated from research into a proposed data centre in Killala, Ireland. While reciting this text, I passed across the central bridge of the atrium at Tufts-SMFA (my alma mater), carrying a television monitor with videos from Under the Feet of Shadows, a custom printed “flag,” and transparencies with video stills suspended from an apparatus coated in gold leaf.
In this performance, I critique the predominant objectives of current visions for AI developments that centralize machinic imitation and replacement of human generated content. Instead, I produce another imaginary for AI that focuses on how such technologies are increasingly treating humans as machines. Through my gestures, I embody the typically invisible ways that humans are being mediated and conditioned to think, create, and behave as computational systems, making tangible what is being neglected through dominant desires for human-like AI systems.
This performance was presented as part of the Undoing the Archive with other members of the Mobius Artists Group as part of an archive and/or a repertoire at Anderson Gallery, SMFA at Tufts. This event was curated by by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, with assistance from TUAG Graduate Research Fellow Wenxuan Xue (Tufts University PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies).
Documentation by Joanne Laws, Lani Asunción, and OJ Slaughter
