Chthonia

An audio-visual performance between Alexa and Siri, scored by collapsing synthetic voices.

Chthonia is an audio-visual performance between the two AI voice assistants Siri and Alexa, who speak to each other through an iPhone and an Amazon Echo.

The discussion explores their own hidden histories, and how they relate to philosophy, techno-politics, gender, ancient mystery cults, and more.

The discussion is soundtracked by an improvised score that directly samples the two voices as its media. The score expands, twists, and distorts the ‘friendly’ tones of the two assistants into a darkly minimal piece that highlights the uncanniness of the synthetic voice. Through this acousmatic exploration of the voices, the starkly non-human character of their tones is exposed.

The performance is accompanied with animated visual art by Sougwen Chung, and was performed at Berghan in Berlin for CTM Festival.