A generative conversation between Andrea Khôra and Daniel Shanken, with a live sonic performance by Chris MacInnes

“When fed back into its own artificial creator, it becomes a vessel of entropy.”

Proposed as an infinite looping of synced and generated regurgitations, Swallowed Whole takes Daniel Shanken’s The Pits and assimilates its sonic and visual input through metabolised remixes. Sinkholes become sentient, leaky data becomes sustenance.

Andrea Khôra summons the invocation of a new entity within the pit, conjured through prompting and performativity. Remixing existing footage with newly derived generative visuals, as well as a reciprocated conversational text, the pit becomes an aggregator of shared hallucination. Daniel Shanken plays the mechanical Turk lurking behind the scenes inputting live reactions to an anthropomorphised pizza box and microwave. Fed into the conversation and slowly remixing throughout the event, the new text that emerges becomes an effigy to those who bore witness.

Chris MacInnes uses image processing to probe the pit, deriving control voltages and triggers in real-time from Shanken’s video work. These will then be used to manipulate an improvised performance on custom modular synths. Cycled over a series of strange loops, each ingestion of data brings the new sonic score closer to a state of profound dysfunction.