Libby Heaney and Nabihah Iqbal, The Whole Earth Chanting, Sonár Festival, Barcelona, October 27 – 31, 2021. Photo credits: Tom Gibbs.
The Whole Earth Chanting, 2021, live performance with AI generated sound & live interactive AI visuals, 45minutes; in collaboration with Nabihah Iqbal.
The Whole Earth Chanting uses AI and the power of voice, sound and music to explore new expressions of belonging and collective identity between humans and non-humans – a post-human spiritualism.
During the performance, a singer responds to chants generated
by artificial intelligence, which was trained on data ranging from Gregorian Chanting to the humming of equipment in the quantum physics lab. As religious chants mingle with football fans’ singing, birds and live singing, the rigid categories through which we usually understand the world are dissolved.
The Whole Earth Chanting subverts habitual uses of machine learning. Rather than separating and dividing, the algorithm creates its own hybrid sounds by weaving together seemingly disparate categories thus blurring boundaries between human and non- human.