Constant Innovation

2025

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Performance with AI voice training, poem, extension cord hobble skirt, single channel video, LED panel, live sound

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Collaboration with FLEMING

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Constant Innovation is a collaborative performance work between myself and multimedia artist FLEMING that blends AI training, video, fashion runway, live sound and drag. It explores submission to consumer technologies as a prerequisite for certain forms of social connection and the agency users have within this. 

 

The work opens with a video where I train a “Personal Voice,” Apple’s accessibility-oriented software for making a custom screen-reader voice. The video is silent, overlaid by FLEMING's live sound. Visually, it’s clear I'm screaming the prompts although my voice can’t be heard. Gradually the audience becomes aware that FLEMING and I have been approaching slowly from the back of the room, as I move slowly through the crowd in a costume of wrapped cable, vinyl and pleasers that restricts my movement to very small steps, corded to FLEMING who plays the set from their laptop while walking, tied to me with cords.

 

The voice generating software, not designed to process a loud and emotional voice, generates a voice which is constrained and grating. I lip sync to my own poem, performed by the screen reader.

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Photos: Ricardo Adame (Poetry Foundation) and Ruby Que (Elastic Arts)

 

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