Xenocene refers to the age of the non-human: plants, animals, fungi, and forms of artificial intelligence. The prefix “xeno,” meaning “other” or “foreign”, signals a shift away from human-centered reality toward a multiplicity of perspectives, intelligences and forms of agency.
In this performance, Claudix Vanesix uses their own body as input for a Stable Diffusion model that speculates on non-human life and cyborgism through the perceptual lens of AI. With a technocritical stance, the work instrumentalizes xeno-texts, xeno-images, and xeno-sounds to expose the supremacist fetishes embedded in projects such as bioengineering, cryptoeconomics, space colonization, and the race toward Artificial General Intelligence.
Xenocene challenges human dominance over meaning by juxtaposing human “reality” with the "xenoreality" produced by an AI system. Is the world we perceive the only one that exists? Or merely one perspective among many, entangled in a post-human ontology where non-human intelligences also claim agency?

Direction and performance: Claudix Vanesix
Text and music: Claudix Vanesix, ChatGPT, Udio
Real Time AI: Théa De Seauve
With support from: TABAKALERA San Sebastian; New Images Festival Paris

Claudix Vanesix (PE) is an artist from Peru dedicated to feminist and decolonial AI and XR in film and performance art. Artistic Director of FIVIA - Festival International de Vidéo et Intelligence Artificielle in France, and Co-Founder of AMiXR: anti-futurist Peruvian collective. Claudix's work has been awarded and exhibited internationally across Latin America, the USA, Europe, and Asia. Their practice examines sexism, racism, and authoritarianism in tech systems. Recent works employ textile and movement to interrogate technological determinism, challenging transhumanist narratives through embodied and cultural practice.

XENOCENE is a compelling example of AI within a live performance context and its critical examination of technology through a queer, decolonial, and feminist lens. Rather than using technology as spectacle, Claudix Vanesix places their own body at the center of an unfolding dialogue between human and machine, employing real-time AI image generation to transform the performer into shifting xeno-identities. The work moves beyond technological novelty to question how machine perception shapes ideas of identity, agency, and otherness. The jury was impressed by the sophistication with which AI functions as both medium and subject matter, exposing the ideologies embedded within contemporary technological systems while imagining alternative futures.