Portrait XO

Artistic Lab

What remains recognisably human?

A futuristic, glitch-art digital portrait of artist Portrait XO framed inside an old CRT television screen, showing her with a metallic septum ring, dark dripping liquid eye makeup, and cybernetic hair pins slicing through a distorted, pixelated visage.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Under the alias Portrait XO, Rania Kim Birch flips voice, electronics and artificial intelligence into a restless kind of musical experimentation. Classical piano and a fascination with jazz and improvisation form part of her musical foundation, but the music soon breaks away from those origins to soar through the soulful electronics of experimental pop. Her voice is often the point of departure before destabilizing, processed and fed into systems that generate unexpected tumors within the original. As founder of SOUND OBSESSED and a researcher of computational creativity and human-machine collaboration, she’s equally interested in what happens to authorship when a system begins contributing to the work and what new forms might emerge in the space between the two.