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.
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.
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”.
Deserve ItDec’23 -> Nov’24Gray Area AIR, San Francisco, CA, USA
Deserve It is an immersive performance where viewers confront a haunting simulation of the migrant experience. Sitting behind a screen, they fill out shifting bureaucratic forms as the artist enacts their choices in real time. It’s part installation, part slow ritual, unfolding over six hours, and asks: what does it mean to perform worthiness? To surrender? To glitch inside a system that keeps looping?
def(hug)Jun’24Gray Area AIR, San Francisco, CA, USA
def(hug): Algorithm’s Embrace is a poetic lecture-performance about AI, queerness, and digital belonging. Drawing from myth, migration, and interactive code, it recasts home as a verb: Indeterminate, shimmering, and alive. Part personal narrative, part chameleonic ritual, the piece asks: how do we queer the interface? What does it mean to be held, digitally, diasporically, by a machine that reflects and reconfigures us?