Human Shaped

Year of Creation:

2022 (Song + Collage) / 2025 (Live Audio-Visual Performance)

Media:

Song + Digital Collage + Live Performance

Dimensions:

Variable

Interaction Type:

Not Interactive

Duration:

2:20 (studio track) / 10–15 minutes (performance)

Description:

Human Shaped is a triptych—collage, song, and performance—that stages the alienated voice of a being “made of silicon but in a human shape.” The digital collage frames this figure as fractured silhouette. The words HUMAN SHAPED are inscribed across the throat like a specimen label. The song extends this visual estrangement into sound: a text-to-speech voice recites an eight-line poem, looped asynchronously into a drifting rhythm. The manipulated voice feels uncanny—tuned into key yet devoid of breath—embodying a subject that insists on humanity while denied recognition. In live performance, the work transforms again: AI voice samples are triggered from an MPE controller, distorted through pedals and amplifiers into walls of noise, while gestures drive real-time visuals in TouchDesigner. The improvisation climaxes in saturation before collapsing into fragments, enacting catharsis and overwhelm. Across its forms, Human Shaped is both mask and self-portrait—alien voice as proxy for human alienation, asking what it means to be recognized as “human” at all.

Core Question:

If I am human-shaped, why am I not accepted as human?

Loop Analysis

Structure: 

Alien Voice Feedback Loop

Definition: 

A system where identity must be reasserted line by line, each utterance mediated through machines and reflected back as estrangement.

Leverage Point: 

The recognition that the medium (AI voice, collage fragments, distortion loops) is not a style but the embodiment of alienation itself.

Inputs / Outputs: 

Text-poem → text-to-speech voice → asynchronous looping + distortion → audience perception of estranged subjectivity → reflection on human recognition

Effect: 

Unease, empathy, catharsis, recognition of self through otherness

Ethical Valence: 

Vulnerable and critical—performs alienation in order to reveal its mechanics, collapsing human/machine boundaries into shared fragility

Design Note: 

The triptych (collage, song, performance) stages alienation across media: visual fragmentation, sonic estrangement, live catharsis. The work insists that alien voice is also human voice.