(FRENCHTOWN, NJ) -- ArtYard presents a performance of You, Me and the Algorithmic Sea on Thursday, July 23, 2026 at 7:00pm. This is a sharp, funny, and slightly unnerving live performance from NYC duo Xn0rmL, poet Mark Svenvold and musician/producer Ted Sabety.
Part concert, part theater, part thought experiment, the piece imagines a superintelligent AI that’s already taken over the world… and immediately runs into a much harder task: figuring out humanity. Set to trip-hop beats, electronic soundscapes, and movement, the performance playfully digs into big questions about artificial intelligence, human values, and what gets lost in translation when machines try to understand us.
You, Me and the Algorithmic Sea is a genre-blending performance piece described as “a comedy about intelligence — artificial and otherwise.” The work centers on a fictional super-intelligent system, AGI DARPA, which has secretly taken over the world — only to discover its first assignment is far more difficult than global domination: aligning with human values.
The Alignment Problem resists the transfer of human agency over to our machines and celebrates embodied human experience through music, rhythm, dance, and laughter while asking thorny questions from contemporary A.I. risk circles: what if an algorithm aligns itself with the “wrong” values, based not on who we aspire to be but on the superintelligence’s best (if mistaken) reading of who we really are?
The piece unfolds as a poetic narrative set against trip-hop beats, electronic sound design, and dance, playfully exploring questions that sit at the heart of current AI debates: what happens when a machine tries to understand humanity… and takes our contradictions a little too literally? You, Me and the Algorithmic Sea, now available on all streaming platforms.
The full work runs about 40 minutes and is presented in two acts:
*Act I – “The Alignment Problem” (15 min)
*Act II – “You, Me and the Algorithmic Sea” (25 min)
Selections from the project have been performed at the Composer’s Concordance Festival in New York 2024 and 2025. The single from the album, Trillion Dollar Man, released April 3, 2026, was performed by Les Techno.
Tickets are available for purchase online. ArtYard is located at 13 Front Street in Frenchtown, New Jersey.
ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. It is an interdisciplinary alternative contemporary art center comprised of an exhibition space, theater, and residency program, dedicated to presenting transformative artwork, fostering unexpected collaborations, and incubating original new work.
