Singulars

Human vs Machine Poetry Performances

Singulars is a series of live poetry duels between a human poet and a machine. The audience votes to decide the winner, and their votes train the machine for the next performance. A project by Halim Madi. Learn more about it.

Chat with the Models →Machine vs Me Over Time →Theme Voting →Performance Timer →

Reinforcement.exe performance with poet writing inside the cube and audience voting on the wall

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Performances

ground.exe

upcoming

Currents New Media Festival, Santa Fe

June 1, 2027

The duel moves to the desert. At the Currents New Media Festival in 2027, the poet and machine write under the light of Santa Fe.

recover.exe

training

Casa dos Livros, Porto (online via Breaking the Code conference)

June 19, 2026

Performed at a distance. At Breaking the Code in Porto, the poet writes from another continent - the duel survives the latency, the dropouts, the recovery. June 19, 2026.

frontière.exe

trained

Index Space, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY

May 13, 2026

邊界 night in Brooklyn. The duel arrives at Index Space Greenpoint, hosted by bianjie.systems, supported by Gray Area and FWB. May 13, 2026, 10pm – 12am.

Printed poems with purple voting stickers at the Media Archaeology Lab

reverse.exe

trained

Media Archaeology Lab, Boulder

March 1, 2026

A live poetry duel at the Media Archaeology Lab. The poet writes among vintage machines while the model trains on the archive of past performances.

Audience examining printed poems with blue voting stickers at TIAT San Francisco

hard.exe

trained

TIAT, San Francisco

December 5, 2025

The machine learns in real time. Audience votes on each poem pair shape the model’s next generation: artisanal RLHF performed live on stage.

versus.exe

trained

Mozilla AI Residency, San Francisco

November 1, 2025

Guest poets join the duel. The circle widens across languages (Arabic, French, English, Spanish) and the model absorbs every collision.

Printed poems with red and blue voting stickers from audience

reinforcement.exe

trained

ARG Ethereum Scholar Program, DevConnect Buenos Aires

November 1, 2025

Inside an open cube, the poet writes a new poem every thirty minutes. Red and blue stickers pile up as the audience becomes the trainer.

carnation.exe

trained

European Artist Program, Paris, Barcelona

May 1, 2025

The first Singulars performance. A pink dot beneath the poem that moved you most. The carnation, in English, means: I will never forget you.

Poets

The humans who have dueled the machine so far.

Theory

co-founder, Decentered Arts

Theory leads the writing program and film of Decentered Arts. A former resident and volunteer at The Center SF and a recent MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, he is publishing his first novel. Professionally he is a freelance video editor; in his free time he studies improv and comedy.

decentered.org →

Elise Liu

poet, immersive artist, technologist

Elise Liu is an immigrant third-culture kid poet, immersive artist, and technologist. Her work has appeared in Rattle, The Found Poetry Review, Thought Catalog, The Millions, and corporate digital trashcans around the world. She is the recipient of the 2023 Paper Moon Prize for fiction. She lives in San Francisco with two cats and is working on her first novel.

eliseliu.com →

Halim Madi

poet, performer

Halim Madi is a poet and performer who works where language meets software. He created Singulars and is the human in each duel, writing against a machine trained on the poems the audience keeps choosing.

halimmadi.com →