01 Introduction

Secret Mirrors is a live poetry and audio-visual projection performance by Anna Ren and Catherine Chen. The performance draws from Chen's poetry collection Beautiful Machine Woman Language (Noemi Press, 2023), which extrapolates their experiences as a data transcriptionist for Amazon Echo. It examines the emotional and invisibilized spaces occupied by human workers who service AI technologies, and what it means for a body to be processed, categorized, and discarded by systems that hear without understanding.

Throughout the performance, cyborg silhouettes are projected. Faceless and without identifiable features, the figures move as if searching, crossing, separating, and reappearing, while the poet’s body moves through the environment. As the performance progresses, the cyborg bodies are processed in real time through custom GLSL shaders, transforming the image into fields of ASCII characters, noise, and glitch artifacts. The body becomes increasingly fragmented and partially unreadable.

At the same time, text discarded from the poem is introduced to the performance through visual projection, accompanied by the poet’s earlier voice that is recorded in real time and played back live with delay. Removed language returns visually, while spoken language returns as delayed sound, raising the question of what gets heard, misheard, saved, or discarded.

Selected keywords from the poem are projected into the space, overlapping and overwriting one another. By the end, the projection shifts into blue and white ASCII, echoing to transcription error, function error, and discarded utterance. These layers continue to accumulate until the projection space turns white, overwhelmed by the amount of information it carries. Selected keywords from the poem are projected into the space, overlapping and overwriting one another. By the end, the projection shifts into blue and white ASCII, echoing to transcription error, function error, and discarded utterance. These layers continue to accumulate until the projection space turns white, overwhelmed by the amount of information it carries.

02 Photo

03 Performances