Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leasure to behold
Farr off th' Empyreal Heav'n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermind square or round,
With Opal Towrs and Battlements adorn'd
Of living Saphire, once his native Seat;
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendent world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies.
Claire Tolan is a writer whose work examines voice, artificial intelligence, intimacy, and the social relations produced by human–machine systems. Since 2013, she has worked with ASMR as a medium for studying attention, trust, embodiment, and mediated presence. Her ASMR radio show, You’re Worth It, aired on Berlin Community Radio for six years, and she co-wrote and performed “Lonely at the Top” on Holly Herndon’s album Platform.
Her performances, games, installations, and audio works have been presented at Martin Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Volksbühne, CTM Festival, ArkDes, Sónar+D, HKW, and other venues across Europe. Her technical background includes serving as CTO of two startups. She studied Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Tolan’s recent projects investigate artificial voices, AI companions, and the conditions under which synthetic agents become believable, intimate, or socially consequential. Soother is a whispered AI companion trained on her own voice. CICADA GAMES is an AR app-as-poem and related cycle of essays, poems, and performances about non-autonomous agents, surveillance, play, and the desire for freedom. Sibyl’s Primes and LULZ, NOON extend these questions into theatrical and speculative forms, using the figures of Alice, Bob, Eve, and Sybil to explore alignment, secrecy, agency, and desire.
Across formats, her work asks how voices without bodies acquire presence, how interfaces produce attachment, how humans are reshaped by sustained interaction with artificial agents, and what obligations emerge toward the voices, agents, and systems they create. She lives in Berkeley.
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
Contact
ct at pendent dot world