İnsan Sofrası (literally “The Table of People”) is a socially interventionist, post-internet artwork by Beste İleri and Toprak Fırat. It originated as an experiment in AI-generated music in Turkish, and evolved into a full-scale performative fiction, a counterfeit pop-cultural phenomenon that mirrored, mocked, and provoked its own audience. We began by using text-to-music models (Suno) to produce songs in the idioms of Turkey’s most monumental genres as Arabesque, pop, fantasy/folk, rap, protest rock, even vapid “spiritual” anthems. Each song mimicked the sonic tropes of its genre while inserting strategically abject, ironic, and politically pointed lyrics, such as: a lament for corporate workers fixated on food-coupon apps; a tragicomic pop ballad about the discovery of a husband’s fetish in a society where sexual repression is endemic; a rap track exposing the fragile, dysfunctional self-image of Turkish “street” masculinity; a hymn to the hollow frenzy of NFTs; an anime-girl love song whose obsessive tone revealed the misogynist undercurrent of many mainstream lyrics.

The songs were not merely parody but functioned as cultural diagnostics, using genre as a semiotic container that exposes the class, gender, and ideological imaginaries embedded in Turkey’s pop music history. We then extended the project into a fake album release, complete with invented singers, a fictitious production company, AI-generated visuals (via Midjourney and RunwayML), a physical launch party with celebrity guests, a DJ set, designed cocktails, branded wall prints, entrance stamps, stickers, vinyls, even a faux whiskey sponsor. By midnight of the launch, the album dropped on Spotify; the partygoers posted about it in costume; real musicians and influencers reacted online. This double performance of cultural industry constitutes the core of the artwork. The project’s “truth” lay in the audience’s reactions: the mixture of confusion, and complicity revealed how deeply entrenched genre, celebrity, and authenticity myths still structure Turkish popular culture, and how AI can act as a new mirror that distorts and intensifies these myths.

By staging a plausible yet artificial cultural event, İnsan Sofrası interrogates the commodification of cultural memory and genre as class-coded entertainment, the gendered and repressive sexual scripts still prevalent in mainstream pop culture, the fetish of “authenticity” in an era where generative AI can mimic both sound and spectacle, and the participatory role of audiences in sustaining these cultural rituals.

Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool or as a threat to creativity, İnsan Sofrası uses it performatively, to expose the infrastructures of taste, aspiration, and belief that underlie both human-made and machine-made culture. As the project expanded, it revealed itself as a multi-layered organism composed of overlapping artistic modes:

• Socially engaged intervention: the project infiltrated real social media ecosystems and nightlife scenes, prompting genuine public reactions.
• Performance / Live art: the launch party functioned as a durational performance with a participatory script.
• Post-internet installation: the online presence (Spotify, Instagram, digital album art, fake personas) and the physical staging (costumes, props, branded ephemera) together form the installation.
• Sound work / Conceptual music: the AI-generated tracks stand as autonomous pieces but only fully “activate” in the fictional context.
• Critical design & media fiction: the branding, faked sponsorship, and corporate-style visuals reveal the operational aesthetics of contemporary music culture.