Terminal text from To foreign lands I sing, (A) I program of chants

Monitor installation in a garden setting

To foreign lands I sing, (A) I program of chants

Site-responsive performance and interactive installation

To Foreign Lands I Sing, (A) I, a Programme of Chants was a site-responsive performance and interactive installation presented in the garden of Miami’s historic Casa Lin during Art Basel. An artificial-intelligence system, trained on the writings of Walt Whitman, continuously generated new poems in an approximation of the poet’s expansive voice, collapsing literary history into an unstable, endlessly unfolding present.

The text appeared on a television mounted to the exterior of a weathered shed, but the machine could only be activated through a deliberately physical and improvised gesture: visitors used a wooden stick suspended from a string to reach through a drilled hole and switch the system on. Simultaneously, the program ran on a phone carried by an opera singer who wandered through the garden, transforming the algorithm’s emerging lines into spontaneous song.

Moving between screen, voice, architecture, vegetation, and audience participation, the work placed technology within a living landscape rather than apart from it, exploring how nature and history are continually reinterpreted through new tools. The garden became both stage and collaborator, while the unpredictable convergence of machine-generated language, human breath, movement, and chance turned Whitman’s poetic inheritance into a collective act of improvisation.

Programmer: Pablo Beltran

Vocalist: Kali Geiger