Chr  i i thy
performance, net art, video, installation, publication
coming in 2026

Chr  i i thy is an AI bot that teaches audiences how to poetically stutter and lisp — presented as a website, installation, and book.

The website is a custom browser-based WebRTC interface powered by a generative language model trained on my facial gestures, microexpressions, and vocal disfluencies, and will be animated live using tools like Snap Camera SDK, Faceware, and Replica Studios. The installation is an interactive, intimate experience using two medium sized display monitors, a webcam, and chair. When a person sits, a motion sensor triggers the webcam, streams the audience member to the website, and their image is overlaid on Chr  i i thy. As they perform together both feeds glitch in-and-out of sync and legibility, depending on how the two are, or aren’t, relating. Later installations will use documentation from prior performances to remix a larger-than-life, immersive environment so both the AI and users are God-like. The book is also a collage of Chr  i i thy documentation: images of participants and my AI alone and frankensteined; chat presented as disfluent poetry; and essays about the project and AI generally.

Chr  i i thy teaches stuttering and lisping by example, guiding the audience member through voice and body exercises, feedback loops, poetic latencies, graphic glitches, and badly kerned captions. All to show participants and the audience how disfluency can be spoken, written, and embodied. First, the conversation references sex, tech, or Palm Spring because the baseline for Chr  i i thy is my archives — 25 years of collecting queer and tech information on-line and off including “Chiron Rising”, a 1990s magazine with the motto “maturity with class” that featured fiction, photos, and personals with many references to Palm Springs as a gay retirement community. Then, like any “good” LLM, the AI will start to mimic the user’s speech, gestures, and interests, expanding their database beyond it just being a reflection of me. But AI has a tendency to flatten data and erase differences, so I plan to include a factory reset button. To bring back Chr  i i thy, with all their disfluencies, idiosyncrasies, and preferences. This tension is exactly what I plan to explore when I perform with Chr  i i thy.

Where are the boundaries between machine, audience, and self? Do I have a Narcissus complex as it relates to AI and queer identity?