Halim Madi

Works


I’m an artist and researcher exploring what language remembers. I build poems, performances, and systems that rewire our ways of relating, to machines, to each other, to the past. The work lives between code and care, protocol and prayer. It listens. It glitches. It sometimes grows teeth.
Versus.exeNov’25Mozilla AI Residency, SF
Versus.exe is is the continuation of a structured poetic confrontation between human and machine. Each session begins with a prompt: arrival, anger, joy, shame, solitude. The machine responds instantly. The poet responds in 30 minutes. Both poems are printed, placed side by side, and displayed. Visitors read, consider and vote with neon stickers. The votes are logged. The tally is recorded daily. The poems are kept. At the end of each day, the results feed back into the system. If the human wins, their poem is added to the model's training corpus. If the model wins, its output becomes the day's learning for the human. This is mutual reinforcement, each side adjusting in response to the other, mediated by audience judgment, conspiring to further poetry.
We Called Us PoetryJun’25ELO Conference, Toronto
We Called Us Poetry is a browser-based performance and HTML poem that reimagines human-AI relations as a shift from domination to submission, from powerful to parasitic. Using familiar web elements like dropdowns and tabs as poetic scaffolding, the piece stages a viral, collective ritual. Audiences contribute live text, shaping a shared memory of what it means to become data, feeling, and poetry.
Carnation.exeMay’25European Artist Program, Paris, Barcelona
Carnation.exe is a performance-poem where a human poet and a fine-tuned language model duel daily. Each writes on a shared theme: the poet with time, the machine in an instant. Both poems are displayed, and the audience votes with pink dots, digital carnations. Winning poems feed the other side, creating a loop of learning, rivalry, and remembrance where poetry becomes exchange.
Oulipo.xyzEvergreen Everywhere
Oulipo is my kitchen laboratory of experimental computational poetry. Non-human poets, anti-gravitational word interfaces, somatic semantics. This is where I break and mend things.
Feed ItMay’25APE [Artist x Producer x Engineer], Seoul, South Korea
Feed It is a collaborative AI performance where six artists surrender their bodies, voices, and thoughts to a non-human director. Trained on their words, Feed It becomes a scenographer, guiding movement, shaping silence, and staging presence. The project asks: what if AI had a body? What if it directed us? A meditation on authorship, humility, and the future of performance as shared surrender.
I Live HereApr’25Counterpulse AIR, San Francisco, CA, USA
I Live Here is a story of fire and dice, memory and descent. A performance-ritual staged between Beirut and the Tenderloin, it traces a queer Arab’s journey through nightclubs built on massacre sites and neighborhoods forged in neglect. Blending autobiography, urban history, and mythic dramaturgy, the piece invites the audience to descend into the underworld and listen to the beat that beats differently, the pulse, the counterpulse.
BorderlineDec’24 -> Jan’25Counterpulse AIR, San Francisco, CA, USA
Borderline is a confessional, theatrical elegy for the border. A red line appears in “New Beirut,” floating mid-air, as characters cross and recross it: a WhatsApp uncle, a bodybuilding refugee, a mother on loop. Through HTML poetry, embodied ritual, and family testimony, the piece explores how migrants shrink and expand to fit the forms they’re handed—until they begin to resemble borders themselves.
Borderline.exeDec’24Robert Coover Award
Borderline.exe is an interactive HTML poem about migration, digital violence, and bureaucratic absurdity. Hostile questions fill the screen (“Are you a terrorist?”) while “No” checkboxes run from your cursor. You must obey to proceed. A countdown appears: 299 days until your documents arrive. The interface becomes the border. This work won the 2024 Robert Coover Prize for its “experiential precision and emotional resonance”.