Two+Aliens

God Bless The United States Of Aliens is a non-looping, eighteen-minute AI-voiced ceremony for the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2026, where it appears as a guest work in Domus Diasporica (Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, curated by Isidora Živković, commissioned by Sarita Vujković, Palazzo Malipiero, May 9 – November 22, 2026). A visitor scans a QR at the pavilion, puts on headphones, taps Begin, and hears a private mass: four non-human voices — an EYEWITNESS filing a surveillance report, a CHURCH LEADER addressing the congregation, a CHORUS responding with the refrain, and a PRAYING ALIEN's interior monologue across three signals (brain-electric, heart-pulse, gut-rumble). A full ensemble carries the one-word AMEN and HUGS moments. The text — a short story I wrote on Christmas Eve 2024 about a protesting Christmas-Eve mass and overseas-based beings — was minted as the USALIEN ERC-721 on the Base blockchain that same day. The performance now lifts that static text into an active liturgical object. Claude Opus 4.7 is co-director. Each of the fifteen scenes is read by an Opus 4.7 structured-output call (Zod schema, adaptive thinking on, prompt caching) that casts the voices, sets per-segment pacing and reverb presets, and emits SSML for Kokoro-82M to perform. The director isn't a chatbot — it's a function: scene markdown in, validated direction JSON out. The piece operates across three frames of "alien" simultaneously — legal (the artist as non-EU non-citizen in Brussels), technological (AI as alien intelligence reading the mass from outside the species), cosmic (the story's surface narrative of overseas-based beings). The engine ships open-source from end to end — EUPL-1.2 for code, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 for the artwork — where most AI art ships only its outputs. Made at Hectolitre, Brussels — the residency where the work was developed — and made possible by the $500 in Claude Code API credits, without which a Brussels-based, unbanked artist would not have been able to co-direct this with a frontier model.