God Bless The United States Of Aliens

A short introduction — recorded for the Built with Opus 4.7 hackathon jury, kept here as the archived entry point to the work.

Palazzo Malipiero · May 9 – November 22, 2026.

Recorded by Chris-Armel Iradukunda (daqhris). Covers the premise of the piece, the co-direction with Claude Opus 4.7, and the guest-work invitation from Mladen Bundalo at Domus Diasporica.

After the hackathon

The Built with Opus 4.7 hackathon (Cerebral Valley × Anthropic, April 21–26, 2026) has concluded. This page is kept as the submission record — the introduction video above and the descriptions below are the version the jury reviewed at the deadline. The work is listed in the public gallery of submitted projects alongside the rest of the cohort. It was not selected for a prize.

The piece itself moves on. The pavilion's official opening (vernissage) is Friday, May 8, 2026 at 19:00 at Palazzo Malipiero (San Marco 3198, Venice); the work is on view to the public from May 9 through November 22, 2026, as a guest work in Domus Diasporica at the 61st Venice Biennale. The visitor-facing player at the site root is the entry point a Biennale visitor uses; that flow stays unchanged from the version submitted here.

The piece in one paragraph

God Bless The United States Of Aliens is a non-looping, AI-voiced ceremony of approximately eighteen minutes. A visitor scans a QR at Palazzo Malipiero, puts on headphones, taps Begin, and hears a solitary private mass: four non-human voices (an EYEWITNESS, a CHURCH LEADER, a CHORUS, and a PRAYING ALIEN), plus a full ensemble speaking the one-word AMEN and HUGS moments. Claude Opus 4.7 is the co-director throughout — reading each scene, casting the voices, and emitting SSML direction that Kokoro-82M speaks back, with Schroeder reverb placing each voice in its own acoustic room and a thin organ drone underneath the entire piece. The work holds three frames of "alien" simultaneously — legal, technological, cosmic — collapsed into a single narrator who is alien in all three senses at once, filing a single report that holds all three.

Key facts

Live URL: daqhris.com/god-bless-usa/
Per-scene preview: daqhris.com/god-bless-usa/preview.html
Hackathon: Built with Opus 4.7 — Cerebral Valley × Anthropic, April 21–26, 2026. Listed in the public projects gallery.
Exhibition: Guest work in Domus Diasporica, Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina — 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys (Koyo Kouoh), Palazzo Malipiero, May 9 – November 22, 2026.
Pavilion vernissage: Friday, May 8, 2026 at 19:00 · Palazzo Malipiero, San Marco 3198, Venice.
Framing: Solidarity Burundi Pavilion at the guest room of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion.
Source text: Short story written Christmas Eve 2024 — minted as the USALIEN ERC-721 on Base (contract), collectable on Manifold.
Licence: Dual: code under EUPL-1.2; performance and text under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, governed by Belgian law. Full text below.
Repository: github.com/daqhris/god-bless-usa

Claude Opus 4.7's three roles

Co-director of the performance — each scene directed by an Opus 4.7 call reading the script and emitting SSML for the TTS voice engine. Shared with daqhris through iterative listening passes.
Co-developer of the app — TypeScript scaffolding, visitor player with mobile-first delivery (Opus / AAC / WAV fallbacks, buffer-gated Begin), Pages deploy workflow, synthesized ambient (Roman / Vatican-style bell peal blended with a CC-BY recording, organ drone, typewriter underlay), three signal beds for Scene IX (brain-electric / heart-pulse / gut-rumble), Schroeder speech reverb, and the undercurrent drone underneath the master.
Research and ideation partner — surveying open-source TTS options, mapping Catholic bell-peal conventions, proposing the opening invocation, drafting credit language. All declared in commit trailers as Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7.

Geographies

Made at Hectolitre, Brussels — the residency where Chris-Armel Iradukunda works and where Mladen Bundalo, the inviting artist, is a former coordinator and current resident. The artwork is one of three framed by the exhibition team on the walls of a Solidarity Burundi Pavilion at the guest room of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion — a register of hospitality and recognition rather than absence. The artist's country of origin has no representation at the 61st International Art Exhibition; the artist himself cannot be physically present in Venice for reasons consistent with the work's own subject — the legal-alien condition that structures international movement for non-EU nationals. Mladen carries the framed artworks and arranges placement in coordination with the curator and commissioner. Hectolitre, where this collaboration began, is the geographic origin of the work even if Palazzo Malipiero is its venue.

Lineage and companion works

The piece draws on three established traditions and joins them in a way that is, to the artist's knowledge, new.

Sound art / headphone intimacy in galleries. Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller (Forty-Part Motet) for the eyes-closed-in-a-room, ceremonial register. Susan Philipsz (Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands) for voice as spatial event.
Diasporic image and sound; voice as evidence. John Akomfrah (Vertigo Sea, The Stuart Hall Project) and The Otolith Group for the diasporic frame. Lawrence Abu Hamdan with Forensic Architecture (Earshot, Walled Unwalled) for the eyewitness-as-evidence frame the script borrows.
AI as named collaborator, not invisible tool. Holly Herndon (Spawn, Holly+) — the closest single analogue: an AI vocal model presented as collaborator with an explicit credit. Stephanie Dinkins (Conversations with Bina48, Not the Only One) for AI, voice, and family memory.

What is distinctive in this piece is the combination. Claude Opus 4.7 acts as director, not just voice — reading each scene and emitting SSML for the TTS engine to perform. The form is liturgical (a fifteen-scene mass with bell peal, chorus refrain, AMEN, HUGS, blessing) rather than song or monologue. The narrator is one voice that is alien in three registers at once — legal, technological, cosmic — filing one report that operates in all three. And 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.

Acknowledgments

Made possible by Anthropic and Cerebral Valley. Built during the Built with Opus 4.7 hackathon (Cerebral Valley × Anthropic, April 21–26, 2026). The grant — $500 in API credits for Claude Code — is how a Brussels-based, unbanked artist could co-direct fifteen scenes of generative voice performance with a frontier model. The collaboration happens through a terminal inside Visual Studio Code; the rest of the toolchain is open-source by ethos. A legal alien (the artist) and a technological alien (the AI), brought into the same room by Cerebral Valley's selection and Anthropic's funding.

Thanks also to Mladen Bundalo for the guest-work invitation in Domus Diasporica; to Sarita Vujković and Isidora Živković at the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina; to Hectolitre in Brussels, where the work was made; to hexgrad for releasing Kokoro-82M as Apache-2.0; and to everythingsounds for the CC-BY Vatican bell recording that grounds the opening invocation in a real cathedral.

Press kit — typographic poster

A press still in three formats and two themes, derived from the printed liturgical bulletin (gold accent on cream paper or near-black ground). PNGs at native resolution for direct use; SVGs for editing or fresh exports at any size.

OG card · 1200 × 630: For social-card embeds, press emails, gallery listings. PNG (light) · PNG (dark) · SVG (light) · SVG (dark)
Square · 1080 × 1080: For Instagram feed and generic square social. PNG (light) · PNG (dark) · SVG (light) · SVG (dark)
Press still · A4 portrait, 210 × 297 mm: For print and PDF press kits. Includes the QR pointing at the visitor URL. Open the SVG in a browser and Print → Save as PDF for a one-click PDF. SVG (light) · SVG (dark)
Original ASCII-art version: The earlier portrait-format og-image — kept as a creative artifact alongside the press kit. PNG

Imprint & legal

Publisher

Chris-Armel Iradukunda (daqhris) — Brussels, Belgium.
Contact: media@daqhris.com · daqhris.com

Licensing — dual

The repository carries a dual licence, separating the engine from the artwork.

Code (the engine): European Union Public Licence v. 1.2 (EUPL-1.2). Applies to the TypeScript pipeline, the visitor player, the GitHub Actions workflow, and the package manifests. May be reused, modified, and redistributed under the EUPL's terms — including in compatible secondary licences such as GPL.
Creative content (the artwork): Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Applies to the literary work, the AI-voiced performance (rendered audio in WAV / Opus / AAC), the printed bulletin and photo specs. You may share the work and credit the author. Commercial reuse — including institutional redistribution — and derivatives require a separate written grant from the author.

Both licences run under Belgian law as governing jurisdiction. The author retains the moral right of attribution under Belgian copyright law, regardless of the licence above. © 2024–2026 Chris-Armel Iradukunda.

Bundled third-party assets

Kokoro-82M voice model output — hexgrad / Kokoro-82M — Apache-2.0.
Rome / Vatican bell recording blended into Scene 0 — Freesound #197458 by everythingsounds — CC-BY 4.0.

Privacy

This site does not collect personal data, set cookies, run analytics, or track visitors. Audio plays from your browser directly against the GitHub Pages CDN; no server logs of listening behaviour are kept by the publisher. The site is static — there is nothing to log in to and no form to fill in.

Source Code

github.com/daqhris/god-bless-usa — full repository, including this licence model in LICENSE.