“We’re queer aliens of sorts, drifting away from some original home. We’ve crossed a border, chameleoned our way into mirages of hearth. We’re piecing chimeric selves, gathering cyborg parts, finding dwellings in loss, crafting belonging out of departures.”
~ Halim and a self-tuned GPT 3.5 progeny
Halim Madi حليم ماضي (he / him / they / them) was born in Beirut, Lebanon. They live and work in San Francisco, Beirut and Paris.
A programmer, poet and present-day storyteller حكواتي, Halim embodies and studies migrant, queer and cyborg consciousnesses and their ability to weave new understandings from conflicting worldscapes. They collect and perform tales of border-crossing bodies, syncretic glitches, métis outsiders and sites of transformation who hold keys to a different futuring.
The recipient of the 2024 Robert Coover Award, given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre, and a 2024 artist in residence at Gray Area and Counterpulse, they create poetic web interfaces such as We Called Us Poetry, recently exhibited at Bergen University Center for Digital Narrative’s “More than Meets AI”. They perform these pieces and invite audiences to control both poetic web interfaces and their body as in Deserve It and Invasions.
Halim is an art writer and the author of 4 poetry books. Their work has been covered by TechCrunch, the San Francisco Standard and the San Franciscan. Halim’s a speaker and took the stage at TED, several TEDx events and Gray Area.
In 2021, they founded Oulipo.xyz, a digital poetics studio and small hadron collider dedicated to the intersection of AI, poetry and web technologies. Through Oulipo, Halim offers public speaking, creative technology workshops, and consults organizations seeking to unlock and harness personal and collective creativity.
Between 2014 and 2016, Halim co-founded two technology companies. The most recent, Invisible, is an OAAS (Operations As A Service) specialized in RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). Between 2016 and 2024, Halim launched Avatars at Meta, redesigned Facebook Profiles, revamped 3D navigation in Oculus Virtual Reality and lead the Design Systems and Dashboard teams at Stripe.
Halim holds a Liberal Arts degree from Sorbonne University (2010) and a Masters degree from University of Toronto (2014) with a major in Data Mining, Machine Learning and Quantitative Finance and a minor in Philosophy.
For a biography and information about their exhibitions, awards, residencies, talks and press coverage, refer to their Artist CV.