Crushed NOW

Audio Performances as AI-Generated Videos // Interventions for a 5-Part Concert Series of Spatial Musicology

What is “Crushed NOW”?

Crushed Now — After Turing // Beyond Presence is a five-evening concert series at Kultursaal, Funkhaus Berlin, framed as a platform for “hybrid relational spaces” between instruments, technology, and spatial audio.
The project treats instrumentality not as control over a tool, but as a relational practice in which bodies, apparatuses, algorithms, speakers, rooms, and audiences co-produce the musical situation. The series uses 3D audio, spatialized sound, expanded instruments, AI-video installations, DJ sets, improvisation, and hybrid performance to dissolve the lazy binary of human versus machine. Its artists come from contemporary and early music, coding, DJ-ing, electroacoustic composition, performance, and AI-video, working in changing constellations across the five concerts.

At its core, Crushed Now asks what “presence” means when sound, gesture, attention, and agency are distributed across human and non-human actors rather than owned by one heroic performer.

The series is organized by spaes lab, Gerriet K Sharma and Verena Lercher.

What is my contribution?

My contribution begins not with the score, but with the theme of each evening. Without knowing the specific musical works in advance, I develop AI-generated images in response to the conceptual frame of the concert. I then animate these images using text prompts that describe an imagined sound performance, with sound and video generated simultaneously in Seedance 2. The result is an autonomous audiovisual work that does not illustrate the music, but creates a parallel interpretation of the evening’s theme.