Latent Laughing Medusa
Proposal Type
Performance
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
“Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind”
--Helene Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa (in translation)
As machines increasingly generate our language, what remains irreducibly human—if not the body and its unspeakable excess? Latent Laughing Medusa is a live Zoom performance that explores what emerges when language is no longer supervised by a single voice, human or machine. Working at the intersection of generative AI, somatic writing, and collective participation, the piece asks how computational systems might be redirected away from totalization and toward multiplicity, breath, and embodied overflow.
The project takes inspiration from Hélène Cixous’ 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa, written the year of my birth. While Cixous’ call was addressed explicitly to women writing from historically silenced bodies, this work approaches her text from a queer, gender-expansive position: not as inheritance, but as listening across time. If Cixous urged women to “write the body,” this performance asks what body-writing might look like in the age of large language models.
A composed text, part meditation on memory, signification, gender, and the experience of undergoing a ketamine therapy trial, will serve as the performance’s initial spine. As the event unfolds, this text gradually unwrites and recomposes itself through the friction between vocal utterance, gesture, generative AI outputs, and live audience participation. Linear semantic language loosens into spatialized, sonic, and affective clusterings drawn from the shared field of performer, participants, and machine.
Participants will be invited into structured, often nonverbal interventions—breath, laughter, murmured phonemes—creating a distributed chorus. These inputs will be processed in real time, feeding an evolving computational system that recombines language without stabilizing it into a single authoritative meaning. Through green-screen wearables and body-mapped visual projection, emerging text and image will be literally inscribed into and across the performer’s body, rendering visible a hybrid “latent space” of somatic and synthetic processes.
Framed as a poetic ritual, the performance moves between destabilization and release. It inhabits the risks of unsupervised systems, where coherence fractures and authority dissolves, while exploring whether such destabilization can open into collective and erotic forms of expression. The event concludes by returning to its opening text, now altered by the shared encounter, suggesting that unsupervised clustering may generate new proximities without resolving into certainty.
At a moment marked by the consolidation of algorithmic language, the regulation of gendered bodies, and the contraction of institutions, Latent Laughing Medusa proposes a temporary, many-voiced zone of embodied inscription, where language does not conclude but vibrates.
Latent Laughing Medusa
Algorithms & Imaginaries
“Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind”
--Helene Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa (in translation)
As machines increasingly generate our language, what remains irreducibly human—if not the body and its unspeakable excess? Latent Laughing Medusa is a live Zoom performance that explores what emerges when language is no longer supervised by a single voice, human or machine. Working at the intersection of generative AI, somatic writing, and collective participation, the piece asks how computational systems might be redirected away from totalization and toward multiplicity, breath, and embodied overflow.
The project takes inspiration from Hélène Cixous’ 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa, written the year of my birth. While Cixous’ call was addressed explicitly to women writing from historically silenced bodies, this work approaches her text from a queer, gender-expansive position: not as inheritance, but as listening across time. If Cixous urged women to “write the body,” this performance asks what body-writing might look like in the age of large language models.
A composed text, part meditation on memory, signification, gender, and the experience of undergoing a ketamine therapy trial, will serve as the performance’s initial spine. As the event unfolds, this text gradually unwrites and recomposes itself through the friction between vocal utterance, gesture, generative AI outputs, and live audience participation. Linear semantic language loosens into spatialized, sonic, and affective clusterings drawn from the shared field of performer, participants, and machine.
Participants will be invited into structured, often nonverbal interventions—breath, laughter, murmured phonemes—creating a distributed chorus. These inputs will be processed in real time, feeding an evolving computational system that recombines language without stabilizing it into a single authoritative meaning. Through green-screen wearables and body-mapped visual projection, emerging text and image will be literally inscribed into and across the performer’s body, rendering visible a hybrid “latent space” of somatic and synthetic processes.
Framed as a poetic ritual, the performance moves between destabilization and release. It inhabits the risks of unsupervised systems, where coherence fractures and authority dissolves, while exploring whether such destabilization can open into collective and erotic forms of expression. The event concludes by returning to its opening text, now altered by the shared encounter, suggesting that unsupervised clustering may generate new proximities without resolving into certainty.
At a moment marked by the consolidation of algorithmic language, the regulation of gendered bodies, and the contraction of institutions, Latent Laughing Medusa proposes a temporary, many-voiced zone of embodied inscription, where language does not conclude but vibrates.
Bio
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating electronic writing, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. He is a recipient of awards including an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture, and a Mellon Foundation Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship. He is currently an Associate Professor & Chair of the Art and Technology / Sound Practices (AT/SP) department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 2006-2009, Judd worked with the seminal performance group, Goat Island. In 2012, he co-founded the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) to explore 21st century embodiment through performance, poetics, and emerging technologies. The work of ATOM-r mixes the live body with ubiquitous computing through an implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) in which virtual content is overlaid onto bodies and spaces. ATOM-r was conceived in the image of early modern anatomical theatres, small amphitheaters built for viewing human autopsies and surgical procedures. The collective uses this architecture symbolically to explore the altered and technologically augmented body, to dissect queer histories, and reveal embodied personal narratives.
Judd’s solo and collaborative works have been included in a broad range of festivals, conferences and exhibitions at venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Chisenhale Dance Space (London), Zero1 Garage, Eyebeam (NYC), Le Cube (Paris), Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, House of World Cultures (Berlin), Teatre & TD (Zagreb), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and the Chicago Cultural Center. His work has been the subject of numerous critical studies and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, RAINTAXI, and the Iowa Review.
http://judisdaid.org