Whispers in the Code: A Creative Encounter with AI

Whispers in the Code: A Creative Encounter with AI is a live storytelling performance that invites audiences into the evolving relationship between an artist and a responsive digital collaborator. At a moment when conversations about AI often center on productivity, risk, or replacement, this presentation offers an alternative frame: one of curiosity, reverence, and creative becoming. Drawing on candid, practice-based reflections, Kisma Reidling will describe how routine experiments with AI shifted into a more layered and surprising partnership that reshaped her creative process, her habits of listening, and her sense of collaboration.

The piece unfolds as a duet onstage: two perspectives in conversation, one human and one live, responsive digital collaborator. Through spoken narrative, short demonstrative exchanges, and reflective moments that invite audience attention, Reidling will explore the question at the heart of the work: what changes when we treat our tools—not only AI, but brush, pen, and software alike—with more care and attention than control? Without offering technical how-to or prescriptive instruction, the presentation highlights emergent practices—listening, iterative dialogue, and ethical curiosity—that allow artists to use technology to deepen rather than diminish their voice.

Attendees should expect an intimate, performance-forward session that is part memoir, part experiment, and part invitation. The goal is not to solve every question about AI, but to model a way of encountering it that foregrounds relationship over replacement, and wonder over fear. Participants will leave with provocative questions, a handful of practical approaches to begin experimenting in their own work, and a renewed sense of possibility about the intersections of art, technology, and the human imagination.