With You Me and The Algorithmic Sea (a comedy about intelligence, artificial and otherwise),Xnormal dives into live-triggered electronic music and spoken word performance. A dystopian satire, the work combines Ted Sabety’s experimental sound design with the evocative poetry of Mark Svenvold. You Me and the Algorithmic Sea, introduces the character AGI DARPA, a super-intelligent machine learning system that has escaped its research confines, taken over the world (without the world being the wiser),  then finds itself overmatched by its first task—to “align with human values,” which proves comically difficult even for a diligent, chatty, ever-helpful god-like super-intelligence confronted by a race of creatures who seem diligently set upon destroying themselves.

An evocative, poetic narrative set to trip-hop beats, electronic sound-scaping, and video, You Me and the Algorithmic Sea resists the transfer of human agency over to machines and celebrates embodied human experience through music, rhythm 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?

This work has two Acts:  “The Alignment Problem” (8:53)  and “You Me and the Algorithmic Sea “(24.13), the latter of which is currently comprised of 10  pieces:”Overture”, “I Came for the Interior of You”, “The You Just Lost Your Shit Show !”, “On the Border”, “The Cogito Pitchdeck”, “Diorama for a Dirigible”, “Bing Transition”,  “The Bing Hallucination”, “I’m Fine” and “Its Hard Being God.”

The Act I was performed at the 14th Annual Composer’s Concordance Festival in NYC in May 2024. The  “Overture to Act II of The Alignment Problem” 2:34,  was  performed at the 15th Annual Composer’s Concordance Festival in NYC May 25th 2025.