Contact Sports Kick Off New Era With “Me & My Machine”
The musical persona of visual artist Illumitati kicks off a new era with “Me & My Machine” and a striking companion visual.
Contact Sports – the musical persona of Illumitati, the culture-shaping visual artist, director, and model (Tati Bruening), whose visionary digital art and liminal worldbuilding have amassed over three million followers across Instagram and TikTok – has shared her new single, “Me & My Machine,” available everywhere now via Queens Road Music/Atlantic Records here. Written and produced by Bruening and 2x ARIA Music Award-winner Konstantin Kersting (Fisher, Mallrat, Tones and I), the whirring, irresistible track features artwork from Dutch microphotographer Wim Van Egmond and is accompanied by a striking official music video, premiering today on YouTube here.
“The idea for this song came to me while I was driving through the forest by myself for days, and I felt myself growing attached to my car as I hadn’t had human contact in person or via phone,” she shares. “Maybe I was going a little bit crazy from the isolation, but I had this beautiful symbiosis with my machine and nature, hence the music video being this idealistic image of nature and technology in peace together.”
Directed on location in Riga, Latvia, by filmmaker Kurt Johnson (COBRAH, Yves Tumor), the “Me & My Machine” music video is driven by the core theme of humanism versus technology, rejecting any use of artificial intelligence and instead relying solely on a mix of practical effects, on-set locations, and a massive LED volume. At its center is a fusion of the song’s title, the human body, and the machine: a 35-foot-tall Shibari “Tree of Life” hand-woven entirely from live electrical cords and ethernet cables. The installation was executed by Moir Div, a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and professional dominatrix, who spent a full day weaving the cable structure and more than two and a half hours safely rigging Breuning into the canopy. To anchor the concept in reality, “Me & My Machine” was filmed across two highly specialized, state-of-the-art agricultural facilities, with primary filming inside the clinical, climate-controlled labs of Jūrmala, Latvia’s Bulduri Biotechnology Center, a cutting-edge hub for molecular biology and plant tissue culture, where the crew was required to wear full sterile gear to prevent contamination. The team then juxtaposed this sterile environment by shooting inside the massive greenhouses of one of the country’s leading commercial tomato and herb growers, Dižskudras, located just an hour’s drive south of Riga on the Via Baltica.
Recently wrapping a series of North American live dates alongside Mietze Conte, Contact Sports will soon mark the arrival of “Me & My Machine” with a series of events, including a performance at BODY BAG Presents: Witch Project 002, a high-energy “grotesque hardcore” event set for Saturday, July 11, at Brooklyn, NY’s Elsewhere. For updates and ticketing information, please visit contact-sports.com.
Connect with Contact Sports:
Website | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube
About
Contact Sports is the music project of visual artist, director, and model Illumitati (also known as Tati Bruening). At only 25 years old, Bruening has worked with artists and brands including FKA Twigs, xaviersobased, A24, YSL Beauty, Google, Grailed, among others, building a following of nearly three million followers across socials through haunting digital art and liminal-space world-building. As Contact Sports, blasted and bulbous synth shards dot her music, mapping onto the doom and gloom of a generation morphed by a pandemic and an internet era that feels all-consuming. Raised in Newport Beach, CA, Bruening says she was “bred to play sports,” born to parents who met playing professional basketball in Germany. She played the sport at a varsity level in school, but found herself more drawn to music, fashion, and art. During high school, she discovered the sprightly EDM corner of YouTube shaped by channels like Majestic Casual and TheSoundYouNeed. Further inspired by reference points including Lapalux, Leon Vynehall, and Clams Casino, she released her first singles, “Enzyme” and “WWW” in 2024, followed by “Hydroxyzine” and the collaborative “Radioaktives Mädchen” with Miguel Angeles. At the end of 2025, she continued to evolve with her single “Malaysia Airlines.” Now with “Me & My Machine” and more music on the horizon later this year, a new era of Contact Sports has just begun.
“In a time and generation where we are entirely hopeless for the future, I want to plant a seed in an AI data center and cultivate an entire forest,” Bruening says. “This is the true expression that I would want to put out to the world without it being interrupted by algorithms or the influence of whatever audience I have on Illumitati.”
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