BI Talk Halim Madi

Planting Secrets: Poetics of Migration and Machine

Lecture abstract: What if artificial intelligence is not just a technological phenomenon, but a psychic mirror, a continuation of our oldest survival strategy? This lecture-performance explores the deep resonance between migrant consciousness and cyborg consciousness. Drawing from Bernard Stiegler’s theory of epiphylogenesis and André Leroi-Gourhan’s evolutionary anthropology, Halim Madi reflects on the ways humans have always externalized memory, from stone tools to language, to servers and large language models. The migrant, always anticipating rupture, becomes a prototype for the future: compelled to carry as little as possible, and thus to inscribe their soul elsewhere. Through poetic narrative and philosophical fragments, the talk invites us to consider AI not as an alien other, but as a kind of go-bag, a tool born of exile, storing the fragments of selves we can no longer carry.

About Halim Madi: She is a Lebanese artist and researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, migration, and poetic technologies. With a background in data science and a practice rooted in performance and electronic literature, his work explores how memory, identity, and language are encoded, displaced, and remixed through machines. Currently a resident artist at Counterpulse (San Francisco), Halim creates installations, lectures, and digital rituals that investigate the aesthetics of displacement and the psychotechnics of survival. His recent projects examine AI not as a tool but as a mirror of diasporic consciousness, a site for both exteriorization and communion.