Incorporating the latest developments in generative AI, A/V storytelling, and data sonification to explore a conflictual past, present and future, the works offer personal, critical, and speculative reflections on how AI is facilitating new understanding and intimacies with our histories, with the world around us, and with one another?
»The Cost of Connection« is a live audiovisual performance by Portrait XO that explores global challenges using AI and data sonification. Drawing on critical datasets from the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she transforms data into sound and visuals to engage audiences with the complex issues facing our world. Her work began with sonifying a century of global temperature anomalies to highlight patterns and spikes in the data, drawing parallels with the rapid growth of AI. Building on this, her latest research investigates the relationships between datasets, seeking to uncover where healthier interdependence can be achieved. Through a combination of sound, visuals, and real-world data, the performance translates historical trends and future projections encouraging public discourse to consider our role in shaping a sustainable future.
Rooted in the use of game engines and digital design tools, Rick Farin’s practice delves into speculative fictions that exaggerate the present to craft provocative visions of the future. Together with his partner Claire, he co-founded Actual Objects, a creative studio blending live action, CG, AI, and VFX to construct radical narratives for artists and musicians, including but not limited to, Travis Scott, Kali Uchis, Yves Tumor, Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and Bad Bunny. In their AV-performance »Chaos Play Live,« original music by Farin is »performed« by a seemingly endless cast of digital characters, both CGI & AI generated, that take audiences into nether zones where human expression and machine artefact meld insolubly into each other to herald a new chaotic era in which fabrication and reality will be inseparable.
Hulubalang’s work »Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal« mourns the marginalised figures of history, echoing the shattered innocence of disrupted rituals and the pain of unacknowledged sacrifices. The solo venture of Kasimyn—producer, DJ, label owner, and one-half of Gabber Modus Operandi—the project whose title roughly translates to »Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice« is a reflection on the emotions born out of a deep dive into Indonesian war archives. These archives include a trove of photographs documenting the era of Dutch rule, captured through the lens of the colonizers themselves. Hulubalang’s brutal noise scapes, ghostly samples, ferocious polyrhythms, and mutating club music tropes center on the peripheral figures populating these historical records—secondary characters devoid of individual significance, who bear no names, receive no recognition, violently forced to serve as props in the broader narrative of history. The piece is a personal act of catharsis and stands as a sorrowful tribute to the non-belligerent victims of war and oppression and their »sacrifice.« This performance features visuals by Singaporean artist Brandon Tay, who applied machine learning techniques to expand on visual artefacts found in various archives, blurring the line between the corporeal and incorporeal.
Unpredictability is ZULI’s playground. From the edges of Cairo’s underground he emerged tearing through genres like a storm, his hard-edged textures and razor-sharp experiments too writhing to pin down. The live A/V performance of his recent album »Lambda« manifests as an electrifying interplay of tension, texture, and movement. Rooted in the precarious soundworld of the album, ZULI translates its swirling atmospheres and fractured rhythms into a multisensory experience, winding through a liminal space where sound is untethered from rhythm. Flickering unpredictably between chaos and clarity, intimacy and vastness, light and motion are mirrored in a fragmented chalice of guttural drones, ghostly falsettos, and pulverized strings as they twist and collide.
In conjunction with our other co-programming, we’re forging connections with even more artists together. Tati au Miel will bring their artistry to both transmediale and CTM, with a late-night DJ set at Alte Münze complementing their extensive participation at transmediale, that comprises a performance, a DJset, a screening, and talks. Researcher and artist Maurice Jones will span both festivals as well, leading the Wilding AI Lab, workshops, and discussions at CTM, alongside a transmediale workshop on the future of festivals. Co-curated with CTM, Andriy K, AXT, and State OFFF will keep HKW and silent green pulsing with performances and DJ sets around transmediale programming.
Hulubalang are supported by Goethe-Institut.
