Priyageetha Dia

litany for a failing machine is a sound installation that appropriates the cloned voice of Greta Thunberg to deliver a sermon generated through large language model text prediction. The work operates at the intersection of sonic governance, voice cloning ethics, and eschatological rhetoric, examining how automated systems reproduce the affective structures of authority and moral conviction independently of understanding or intent.

Large language models produce meaning through probabilistic adjacency rather than comprehension and the sound installation enacts this logic at the level of form. The sermon maintains its incantatory cadence as its semantic content dissolves, staging its conviction as a purely tonal and machinic phenomenon.

The work is situated in relation to Peter Thiel's 2025 closed-door lecture series on eschatology and technological acceleration, in which prophetic authority is consolidated through the deliberate restriction of audibility. Against this, Thunberg's voice which is historically constituted through public address and demands for institutional accountability, is detached from its originating body and consent and operationalised within the same eschatological register it has sought to contest.