Vicky Clarke | SONAMB
Vicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester UK, whose work explores materiality, electrical phenomena and ritual. Working with sound sculpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she creates electronic artworks that explore our relationship to technology, considering themes of human agency in autonomous systems, post-industrialisation and the techno-emotional states we experience through these interactions. Her work takes the form of composition and live AV performance, DIY machines & sculpture, digital art & research.
Vicky won the Oram Award 2020 for innovation in sound and music technology from PRS Foundation and the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She is an ‘In Motion‘ Composer for Sound and Music UK 2024-2025, developing her work in spatialised sound for a new installation LATENT SPACES this October 2025 exploring sonic materiality in computational space. She produces music under the moniker SONAMB, her debut album, SLEEPSTATES, a ‘glitchy experimental techno jerker’(Boomkat) was released in 2022, accompanied by net-art piece SLEEPSTATES.NET exploring machine addiction, sleep territories and sonic algorithimic control.
Current Work: since 2019 she has developed a specialism in Machine Learning and Musique Concrete through her artist residency with NOVARS, University of Manchester, in collaboration with PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music, considering how neural networks and concrete materials can project future sonic realities (see research site).The residency was part of the European Art-Science-technology Network for Digital Creativity 2020 – 2021. She is part of UNSUPERVISED a brand new Machine Learning for Music working group between PRiSM and NOVARS aiming to develop knowledge and research in the field of electroacoustic music, sound art and ML computing across the two Manchester institutions.
Her live AV piece, AURA MACHINE, which takes the listener on a journey through training a neural network, is being released in April 2025 on LOL Editions label.The piece premiered on Factmag’s Patch Notes series and was performed at the Science & Industry Museum for Future of Sound LATES and Future Music#3, RNCM. This area of specialism builds on her AI research trip to St Petersburg as selected artist for British Council’s UK-Russia Year of Music collaborating with artists and technologists in Moscow and St Petersburg and ‘AI and neural networks’ study with KIM, University of Karlsruhe, and most recently ‘Neural Materials’, a commission for ‘Cyborg Soloists ,building a sonic AI performance system working with gestural sensors and sculpture.
Through the lens of sound as material, cyclical themes in her work include tuning into unseen forces and considering how our technological interactions mediate & expose systems impacting our lives & emotions. Aiming to better understand our entanglement with technology & nature through a DIY approach, her practice aims to question systems of power & control, as evident in project ‘Circular Sferics’ building environmental sensing machines tuning into EMF/VLF frequencies, interrogating systems of transmission & the materiality of technological ecologies.
Live: Recent live installations include T 1/2, a sound art installation exploring materials from the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, Kazakhstan, a British Council collaboration with Kamila Narysheva, and live performances at Iklektik, Science & Industry Museum, Modern Art Oxford and MUTEK: Barcelona as part of #WEAREEQUALS with Brighter Sound.
Vicky is a selected artist on the AMPLIFY Digital Artist Initiative, an artist development programme promoting and connecting the work of women identifying artists in UK, Argentina and Canada supported by MUTEK Festival, Somerset House Studios and British Council.
Background & formative projects: Interested in our relationship to machines and materials and how these become manifest sonically, gesturally and experientially within performance, her work has featured in documentaries ‘SONIC FUTURES: How technology is guiding electronic music’ from British Council and FACT magazine’s and Artist DIY for FACTmag’s online artist lockdown series in 2020. Through her practice she explores DIY music technologies and the cultures that exist around them, most recently undertaking a creative research study in Berlin on the live AV, art/science & DIY synth scenes supported by the Artists International Development Fund.
Her project ‘MATERIALITY’ (ACE funded) explored sound sculpture as a medium to interface the physical and digital in music making, creating a new performance system incorporating tactile acoustic materials (inc. steel sound sculptures and industrial musique concrete recordings) with live electronic music performance forms. Inspired by constructivism, signal transmission and musique concrete; she explores the form and function of materials, uncovering patterns & properties as sound sources, systems and interfaces. Vicky collaborated with researchers at the National Graphene Institute to develop a conductive graphene music interface for Ableton, this work was featured on Sound and Music’s Composer-Curator series and at Music Tech Fest, Stockholm.
As co-founder of NOISE ORCHESTRA, with David Birchall, a DIY electronics project building Noise Machines that translate light into sound, she has been artist in residence at National Science & Media Museum, STEIM, Pervasive Media Studios, CTM and Q02, developing graphical sound installations, noise walks and building participatory diy technologies. Projects include ‘SWARM’: Play the light of the city’, which was selected for ENLIGHT (European Light Expression Network) to develop portable noise machines where citizens play the light of their cities, premiering at Rome Media Art Festival in 2018. CACTUS Noise Machine, Noise Orchestra’s first light- noise synth was released in 2020, visit noiseorchestra.co.uk to find out more.
Freelance/Professional: Vicky has 20 years professional experience working in the creative arts & tech industries, as an arts manager & producer, most recently as the Associate Artist & Producer at FutureEverything, and previously with a background in gallery education and youth arts managing the Whitworth Young Contemporaries. As a freelance educator across electronic music and digital art, she has worked with Brighter Sound, MIF and as sound art mentor for BBC New Creatives North, and currently teaches Experimental Electronic Music Production at the University of Oxford. Her work aims to ‘demystify technology’ and open access to skills and critical thinking in the arts and technology.
Insta @vickyclarke_sonamb Bluesky @sonamb.bsky.social
VICKY CLARKE 