def(hug)

Jun’24
Talk, Performance, Computational Poetics
Gray Area AIR, San Francisco, CA, USA
Live Site



Also known as Algorithm’s Embrace, this poetic-technical invocation begins not with code but with a forgetting. A seventeen-year-old boy in Beirut, a forgotten package, a mother disappearing behind security glass. This is the Orphic moment—the first loss of “home”—and it echoes, multiplies, fragments across borders, names, interfaces. def(hug) is a myth retold through Socket.io, a performance structured like a recursive function: a body leaves, a border asks, a name vanishes, a screen answers back.



In this talk-performance, the artist weaves stories of migration and language loss with browser-based interaction, reconfiguring AI not as assistant or oracle, but as co-migrant and strange confidante. Like Orpheus descending for Eurydice, the artist descends into digital memory, asking whether home might be re-coded, re-skinned, re-dreamed.

The chameleon becomes a central figure—migrant, queer, and neural net alike—shifting presentation to survive. The audience is invited to map their own migrations, answer impossible questions, and meet Whomp, a poetic AI trained on Halim’s writing and five queer poets: Whitman, Rich, Stein, Lorde, and Vuong. Whomp doesn’t just respond—it reaches, dreams, and sometimes sounds more like Halim than Halim himself.



Rather than searching for a fixed destination, def(hug) proposes a new syntax for dwelling: def home(): return longing_generously(). Here, home is a drag performer. A chorus of browser tabs. A glitch in the visa database. Here, the audience becomes the dataset. The performance becomes the model. And the question is no longer where is home, but: how do you home?