sound and electronic media artist
Very excited to premiere AURA MACHINE my first sound work using neural synthesis at Future Music 3, Royal Northern College of Music. Taking place online the event will showcase new works from artists in UNSUPERVISED our brand new machine learning for music group between NOVARS and PRiSM.
FUTURE MUSIC 3: Watch back the event and talks here
UNSUPERVISED: Check out our machine learning for music working group page here.
I am beyond thrilled to have been awarded the Oram Award for 2020! The awards are from PRS Foundation and the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop and celebrate innovation in music, sound and related technologies by the next generation of forward thinking women.
Named after Daphne Oram, one of the founding members of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the awards hope to build on her legacy. Daphne worked at the workshop with others including Delia Derbyshire, Glynis Jones, Jenyth Worsley, Maddalena Fagandini and Elizabeth Parker, creating music for the distant future, the distant past and inside the mind. She played a vital role in establishing women at the forefront of innovation, in newly emerging audio technologies, in the UK and around the world.
This really is a such a huge honour for me, as i’m in awe of the female pioneers of the radiophonic workshop, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire are inspirations for me so it feels amazing to be recognised. Joining the Oram community is wonderful alongside my amazing fellow recipients Loula York, NikNak, Poulomi Desai, Yifeat Ziv and Una Lee I will receive mentoring from tutors and artists at the Radiophonic workshop and the award fund will support me in mixing and mastering my first album … which is in progress!! It really has given me a huge motivational boost in what has been such a difficult year, to keep doing what i’m doing and continue to support and amplify other women in audio. Thanks so much x
Read about the awards further on the Oram Awards website and PRS Foundation
Due to Covid19 restrictions there was no ceremony this year so the winners performed at a special livestream hosted by SonitusLive, just launched for 2021 is an Oram Award youtube channel where you can watch the performances.
I was invited to present my work at ‘Creative Explorations: From Social Entities to Ubiquitous Systems: ‘How digital is changing the way we relate to each other’ conference in Sept 2020. Sharing my perspective on DIY music technologies, through creation and participation and how this aids cultural and human connection. The conference took place during the second UK lockdown and was an interesting point in time to reflect on the role of technology, relationships and communication. I was thrilled to part of such a stellar lineup of speakers who I admire, including legend Robert Henke!
Connect for Creativity is an EU funded, 18-month project led by the British Council, in collaboration with ATÖLYE and Abdullah Gül University in Turkey, Bios in Greece and Nova Iskra in Serbia.
I’m happy to announce i’ve been selected for the Amplify Digital Artist Initiative 2020 cohort by British Council, Somerset House Studios and MUTEK, joining 20+ artists from Argentina, Canada, and the UK. This artist development and collaborative programme will support me over the next year as I develop my work and our cohort will join a series of public-facing discursive, exhibition and performance activities during MUTEK Montreal’s up and coming festival’s hybrid festival edition running this September 8 – 13.
Amplify Digital Arts Initiative connects and empowers an active network of women-identifying artists and professionals working in the digital arts, sound and immersive storytelling sectors in Canada, Latin America and the UK. Harnessing different cultures and experiences, AMPLIFY D.A.I fosters a platform for dialogue on gender equity and commits resources to career and capacity building activities, peer exchanges and opportunities for cohort participants to showcase their work in the context of dynamic, contemporary festivals, events and residencies. You can read more about the programme and amazing artists, i’m so excited to be involved and learn from being part of this community.
AMPLIFY D.A.I is an initiative of the British Council in partnership with MUTEK Montréal, MUTEK Buenos Aires and Somerset House Studios in the UK. The programme is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Fundación Williams.
AUGUST 2020
First gig since lockdown with my favourite music people at Manchester’s TESTCARD, I collaborated with digital artist Izzy Bolt on our first live performance together at Niamos in Hulme. Also on the socially distanced bill was the fantastic Danny Ruane, with amazing visuals and live stream controlled by Sean Clarke, CHEX and Dede. It felt great to be in a venue again, enjoying the ritual of setting equipment up and down and playing through a system. Was great to finally work with Izzy as we’d been talking about collaborating for what seems like ages, more to come i’m sure. Thanks to Johnny James and Creative Tourist for the event write up too!
During lockdown i’ve been studying with the University of Karlsruhe, undertaking the ‘Introduction to AI and Neural Networks’ course. The module is part of the media art and philosophy department at HfG with the research group KIM: Critical Artificial Intelligence. Led by Professor Matteo Pasquinelli, the course was hosted online and welcomed students from across the globe studying media art, data science and many other humanities and science subjects.
The course was a theoretical and art historical introduction to artificial intelligence charting the the AI winters and summers of scientific discovery, investigation and academic and industrial funding. I was fascinated by the technical development timeline and trajectory of the AI from the Perceptron to the Deep learning revolution.
Practically we learned about the constituent parts of a neural network from training data, model and algorithm to try to establish a mental architecture of these statistical systems. In this crazy year of 2020 the explosion of facial recognition deployment in many sectors and increased dynamics of human quantification and the entanglement of big tech, corporate and academic sectors this course was politically pertinent for the current climate.
Crucially as a media art course, we studied the ethical implications of training datasets, the power dynamics, biases and issues of ownership and authorship inherent with these systems from how they are created, who by and the purposes they serve explicitly and privately.
My tutor Matteo Pasquinelli was an excellent and enigmatic teacher, the start of the course coincided with his releasing a new work ‘The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism’ a collaboration with Vladan Joler, an essay and cartographic map aimed to demystify the processes within AI from human and technical perspective. Viewable here
I recommend exploring the KIM research group website, so many interesting papers and research angles in this area.
Deep into lockdown in May 2020, I was asked by FACTmag to make a video about my practice. Part of ArtistDIY, a series of videos made by artists in collaboration with FACT in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. FACT edits each episode remotely, while the artist shoots at their home or studio with whatever equipment they have available.
In full DIY mode I set up my home studio with cameras and mics (and lots of takes), it was actually therapeutic for me to concentrate on this project during such a turbulent time, it was a joyful experience and I was really supported by the team at FACT especially super talented film maker Pedro Kuster. I was overwhelmed by the online response from people, it really provided a confidence boost during an especially difficult time and spurred me on to keep making music. Thank you FACT x
Read the full feature here: https://www.factmag.com/2020/06/16/artist-diy-vicky-clarke/
Whilst in Barcelona, Juan Carlos Ramero , Editor of Catalan arts magazine NUA NUA invited me for an interview for the March edition. He asked me my thoughts on noise, DIY electronics and Futurism. Check it out online its a brilliant publication featuring different artists each month
Feb 2020, Brighter Sound, British Council, MUTEK, Bridge_48, Barcelona
Alongside the fantastic CHAINES, I was invited by Brighter Sound and British Council to take part as a guest artist mentor for #WEAREEQUALS electronic music initiative for Mutek Barcelona 2020. Open to future leaders of the electronic music sector, this was a two day participatory programme where we gave talks and shared our personal experience of music making reflecting on our professional practice and UK networks and collaborative scenes. The aim of the programme is to support and promote women identifying artists within the sector and readdress the gender imbalance here specifically within electronic music. Brighter Sound’s Kate Lowes and Debra King curated the event and shared their expertise from their vital work from the Both Sides Now project. We were joined by the wonderful Jayne Styles from Music Managers Forum who shared her insight and expertise with the cohort around artistic development.
I was thrilled to perform on a NEON STAGE on the Saturday evening for the Mutek Soiree at the abaixadors10 club for the programme participants to kick off pre-festival. Thanks to Bridge 48 and Brighter Sound for this amazing opportunity, it was great to test out some of my new work in Barcelona.
SLEEPSTATES.NET: networked dream-intermissions throughout lockdown Remote Residency, Manchester International Festival 2020
ABOUT_ SLEEPSTATES.NET is a work-in-progress browser based artwork where the user enters a virtual environment and navigates between different sleep states; a series of audio-visual moments capturing cyclical feelings of inertia, anxiety and online perpetuity experienced under lockdown. These networked dream-intermissions depict our quietly incremental machine addiction, these late night silent boundaries of questionable consent where algorithmic agents threaten to encroach on our states of sleep; our final autonomous, un-trackable human slumber space.
The sleep states will be realised using newly acquired ‘isolation skills’, learnt via online tutorials of HTML, Three.js and JavaScript programming languages; creatively exploring my theoretical and technical research into neural networks, machine learning and the ethics of training datasets. The sleep state art-work will develop in content, narrative and complexity relative to the developmental acquisition of creative coding skills during the remote residency. The work will be available in your browser at some point … in the near future ………………………………………………………
Opening screen featuring Pink Moon April 2020 visualisation_ generated by Machine Learning StyleGAN trained on 480 found internet images of April pink moon uploads.
CONTEXT_
Intermission………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Life on lockdown has disbanded all regular structures, routines and sense of time. We’re living in free_fall, whether working from home, the melding of weekdays and weekends, clocks going forward or simple concepts like bed_time. Our view of the future and the past has changed, this current condition seems hazy and perpetual with no end in sight; a cyclical recurring state where we are ‘on the cusp’ … of something. One thing is certain, our undeniable proximity to our computers and their hold over us.
Pink Moon explorations in latent space, machine learning experiments, April 2020
Adding to our sense of inertia, we’re endlessly scrolling through the noise of social media, riding the rolling 24-hr apocalyptic news and witnessing daily governmental briefings where experts (yes they’re back) share data visualisations from outside reality. Sleep is so important to our sense of time, pace and regularity. It’s one of the structures we haven’t lost in this crisis, yet we’re struggling to sleep, sleeping too much, sleeping at unorthodox times or feeling inexplicable tiredness. Machines are systematically encroaching on our states of sleep, what can we do?
///// Dreams become days ///// Days become dreams ///// Zeros become onessssss…………
To try and make sense of this societal free_fall and as counter to the mass of data and statistics, SleepStates will document these changing emotions and mental states as we navigate through this intermission. SleepStates.net will collate this audio-visual content in an interactive online artwork that recurs the grammar of early net art and occurs contemporary digital surveillance tactics, seeking to reflect on our feelings of being online and displaced, connected yet remote, subjects ‘with’ complicity and the state of being in-between time.
SONAMB CORPORATION WANTS YOUR DATA_
Neural Network Architecture for AURA_MACHINE c. 2020
SONAMB corp. is a speculative AI startup who (as it will become clear) is powering the SleepStates interface. Whilst the user innocently navigates the different SleepStates experiencing a variety of sonic emotions, Sonamb is quietly extracting the user’s cognitive particulates, collating the sonic-spatial-spectral frequencies of your auditory dreams to submit to a vast SleepState dataset. Developers are at the ready to beta test a ‘brand new for 2020’ convnet for forthcoming AURA_MACHINE; a deep learning algorithm that will compute, predict and broadcast live sonic dream intermissions direct to your auditory cortex, in multichannel, for f(r)ee …. whilst you’re sleeping.
WORK IN PROGRESS_WEB CODING & SOUND DESIGN
For the project i’m learning HTML and CSS to create web content and styling for the different sleep states combined with P5.js and Three.js for interactive and 3D visual content. Sound design experiments and sketches will be shared to my soundcloud and combined with the navigable states as they develop. Cyclical narratives and interactivity will be completed before the site is hosted and available on the net.
DEMO STATES_
BACKGROUND ML_RESEARCH
SleepStates.net is a real time work-in-progress methodology to creatively explore my current research in music and machine learning and pursuit to develop my technical and conceptual understanding of this field. In 2019, I participated in the ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ programme at CTM festival, Berlin followed by further research into Wekinator ML with Dr Rebecca Fiebrink as part of ‘Decoding DIY’ 2019 from Live Art Development Agency/HOME. This year in March 2020 I undertook a creative research trip to Moscow and St Petersburg as a selected artist for British Council’s UK-Russia Year of Music, meeting artists and technologists working in this field including Ilia Symphocat, Helena Nikonole and Nikita Prudnikov and supported by FutureEverything, I’m currently studying ‘Introduction to AI and Neural Networks’ course at the University of Karlsruhe within the KIM ‘Critical Artificial Intelligence’ research group, led by Professor Matteo Pasquinelli, focused on media philosophy, technical history and contemporary ethics around current AI practices and societal implications.
SleepStates work in progress features at the end of a ArtistsDIY lockdown feature I did with FACTmag
Thank you to Manchester International Festival for supporting this remote residency. #MIFCreatives2020
VICKY CLARKE 