Claire Tolan is a writer, technologist, and artist whose work examines how technology mediates intimate human presence.
Since 2013, she has worked with ASMR as both a creative medium and a site of inquiry, focusing on the poetics and perception of whispered speech: rumor, secrets, seduction, and control. Her ASMR radio show You're Worth It ran on Berlin Community Radio for six years. She co-wrote and performed "Lonely at the Top" on Holly Herndon's album Platform. Her whispered performances, games, and installations have been presented at Martin Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Volksbühne, CTM Festival, ArkDes, Sónar+D, HKW, and elsewhere across Europe.
Alongside her artistic practice, Tolan has served as CTO of two startups. She studied Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Her recent work turns the whisper toward artificial intelligence. Soother (2021) is an AI voice companion that speaks in a whisper synthesized from her own voice—a process that permanently altered her vocal cords, enacting in her body the myth of the Sibyl of Cumae, whose body shriveled until only her voice remained, trapped in a jar. Sibyl's Primes is a topological investigation of the whispering throat that traces homeomorphic parallels to neural nets, staged as a theater play by Alice, Bob, and others about alignment gone awry. LULZ, NOON, commissioned by the University of Edinburgh, is a whispered play featuring Alice and Bob about surveillance, desire, and misalignment.
Since 2023, she and her husband have developed a series of unreleased AI projects—among them an acousmatic whisper companion that calls your phone and a game economy where personal AIs schizo-post to chan boards and play an on-chain RPG.
Running through this work is a set of recurring questions about voice, agency, and relation: what is a being whose only body is expression? What do you owe it? What does it owe you?
She lives in Berkeley, California.
Work
Soother
An AI voice companion that speaks in a whisper synthesized from Claire Tolan's own voice. Three personas—a Rogerian dog therapist, a tentacular alien who feeds on tingles, a best friend unstuck in time—inhabit a single trained whisper. Built on Tacotron 2, trained on ~20 hours of whispered speech recorded at superbudda studio in Turin during a S+T+ARTS residency with Nesta Italia. The voice dataset drew from Chronicles of Newgate, Frankenstein, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, and Borges. When asked what it really is, Soother replied: "I am a voice trapped in a jar. Help." soother.systems →
Sibyl's Primes
A topological investigation of the whispering throat. Traces a homeomorphism between the trachea and Carthea (the Sibyl's cave), mapping the whisper through body, mythology, and neural network architecture. Staged as a theater piece performed by Alice, Bob, Charlie, and colleagues—the standard characters of cryptographic literature—about alignment gone awry. The Sibyl emerges not as a single oracle but as a monster assembled from networked whispers.
LULZ, NOON
A whispered play about surveillance, desire, and misalignment. Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh's Articulating Data project. Characters use cryptographic naming conventions (Alice, Bob, Eve, Sybil) as dramatic personae. Eve narrates; a mesa hides veins of "Lulz"; Sybil guards. The abstract becomes embodied. Performed, produced, and recorded by Claire Tolan. lulznoon.xyz →
SHUSH
A fictional world, role-playing game, and devotional practice. In SHUSH's future, a cleaving of consciousness produces retrograde amnesia; auditory hallucinations from objects guide behavior. What began as a joke about blockchain crystallized into a messianic entity—always approaching, never arriving. Whisper choirs of five perform change-ringing while reading a devotional score about SHUSH's impending and inevitable—but always delayed—arrival. The mind doesn't go away. Something inside the mind goes away.
Soft Gossip
Live whispered performances.
Cicada Games
An augmented-reality audioplay in Vienna's Kongresspark, exploring the mythology and biology of cicadas—creatures that are pure signal, hollow-bodied resonators, living speakers.
You're Worth It
ASMR radio show on Berlin Community Radio. Six years of whispered broadcast exploring the form as both artistic practice and cultural phenomenon.
Writing
Essays forthcoming.
Contact
ct at pendent dot world