Agnes Cameron
Agnes Cameron is and artist and engineer who works across a range of technologies and media. She is particularly interested in agent-based modelling, alternate histories of computation, and open-ended systems for structuring knowledge. The piece she is developing for the symposium, Working Group, constructs a group dialog in the context of an ongoing bureaucratic process, in which the audience may also participate.
Ahnjili Zhuparris
Ahnjili is a data scientist, Ph.D. candidate, artist, and science communicator. Ahnjili’s academic research focuses on developing smartphones- and wearables-based biomarkers that can be used to monitor one’s mental and physical wellbeing for clinical trials. Ahnjili’s artistic research and science communication focuses on educating the public about A.I. and algorithmic violence, which refers to the violence that is justified or is created by an automated decision-making system.
Amina Abbas-Nazari
Amina Abbas-Nazari is a practicing speculative designer, researcher, and vocal performer.
Amina has researched the voice in conjunction with emerging technology, through practice, since 2008 and is now completing a PhD in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, focusing on the sound and sounding of voices in artificially intelligent conversational systems.
Alongside Amina’s research and practice she teaches design at Goldsmiths, University of London, and RCA, where she previously worked as a Research Fellow on the My Naturewatch project. She has presented her work at the London Design Festival, Design Museum, Barbican Centre, V&A Museum, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial, Critical Media Lab, Switzerland, Litost Gallery, Prague and Harvard University, America. She has performed internationally with choirs and regularly collaborates with artists as an experimental vocalist. https://speculativevoicing.co.uk/
Claire Tolan
Claire Tolan (b. 1986) is an American artist, writer, and programmer living in Berlin. Tolan has worked primarily with ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) since 2013. Her work is concerned with the perception and poetics of whispered speech, with a particular focus on rumour, secrets, and enthralldom. Tolan hosted an ASMR radio show, “You’re Worth It”, on Berlin Community Radio from 2014-2019. With musician Holly Herndon, she co-wrote and performed “Lonely at the Top”, the ASMR track on Herndon’s 2015 album Platform. Other past projects include SHUSHTONES, packages of ASMR ringtones; Die Siedler von SHUSH, an ASMR tabletop RPG prototype; CICADA GAMES, an augmented reality ASMR audio play; and SOOTHER, a prototype AI ASMRtist. Tolan has exhibited, performed, and presented her work at venues such as Martin Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Volksbühne, Münchner Kammerspiele, ArkDes (Stockholm), and Sónar+D.
Tolan is currently building a web3 ASMR video and audio platform, MURMUR, while composing stories, plays, and papers that orbit the platform conceptually and performatively. In addition to her work with ASMR, Tolan has served as CTO of two startups and worked as a programmer and technology strategist with various startups, NGOs, and universities. She studied Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Tolan’s commission for Articulating Data, LULZ NOON, is a whispered audio play starring Alice and Bob, the long-suffering couple of cryptography papers who can never seem to attain secure communication, alongside a cast of their archetypal friends, collaborators, and adversaries. LULZ NOON is an absurdist neo-western about dysfunctional relationships, typed characters, permissioned environments, surveillance, and control.
Elspeth Murray
Elspeth Murray is an artist and writer whose motto is Your Life is a Work of Art. She is live sketching Articulating Data and interacting with the text captured through machine listening at the event.
Elspeth developed her live sketching practice by drawing at conferences, live music events and while touring internationally as company manager with Puppet State Theatre Company. Her drawings feature in Creative Informatics reports of the 2019 Beyond Creativitysymposium and the 2022 Data Policy Hack Day as well as on t-shirts for the band Blue Rose Code.
As a poet her commissioned piece REdinburgh Castle was animated by Cat Bruce, performed by Bee Asha Singh and projected onto 350 million year old basalt for Edinburgh Castle’s winter light show Castle of Light: Kingdom of Colours in 2022.
As librettist she wrote Be Loved: A Passion with composer Duncan Fraser for women soloists at St James Piccadilly in 2022. She is working with Mahogany Opera on The Great Learning a community singing project inspired by the radical 20th century composer Cornelius Cardew’s experimental scores for untrained singers. Her piece Your Life is a Work of Art with composer Dee Isaacs for children in Greek refugee camps is currently being translated into French, Greek and Kurmanji.
Francesco Bentivegna
Dr. Francesco Bentivegna (they/them) is a lecturer of Digital Theatre and Creative Industries at the University of Bristol, a musician, and a theatre practitioner. Their interests move between voice studies and philosophy of technology, focusing primarily on AI, artificial voices, posthumanism, techno-feminism and contemporary queer studies. They finished their PhD with a thesis on Synthetic Voices in Performance, and they have published profusely in the field of Voice Studies and Interdisciplinary Performance Studies. They have a prolific solo career in the performing arts, with a focus on human and machines relations through voice with the stage name Francasixiə, with which they’ve written, directed, and produced multiple nationally recognised performance work.
Jane Frances Dunlop
Jane Frances Dunlop is an artist, writer and educator. She creates installations, videos, essays, poems, and performances. She exhibits and performs in galleries and cultural institutions internationally including Kunstlerhaus (Vienna, AU), Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK) and ACMI (Melbourne, AUS). Her most recent project, select important things (ongoing), was exhibited as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures during the Venice Biennale 2022. Her writing has appeared in academic journals, art catalogues and magazines. Dunlop lives in London, UK and is a Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Greenwich.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Private Ear, listening to, with and on behalf of people affected by corporate, state, and environmental violence. Abu Hamdan’s work has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions all over the world. He received his PhD in 2017 and has held fellowships and professorships at the University of Chicago, the New School, New York and most recently at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz where he developed his research AirPressure.info
Abu Hamdan’s audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and been a key part of advocacy campaigns for organisations such as Amnesty International, Defence for Children International and Forensic Architecture. His projects that reflect on the political and cultural context of sound and listening have been presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the 58th Venice Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennial, Witte De With, Rotterdam, Tate Modern Tanks, Chisenhale Gallery, Hammer Museum L.A and the Portikus Frankfurt. These works are part of collections at Reina Sofia, MoMA, Guggenheim, Hamburger Bahnhof, Van AbbeMuseum, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern. Abu Hamdan has been awarded the 2020 Toronto Biennial Audience Award, the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award, the 2016 Nam June Paik Award for new media and in 2017 his film Rubber Coated Steel won the Tiger short film award at the Rotterdam International Film festival. For the 2019 Turner Prize Abu Hamdan, together with nominated artists Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, formed a temporary collective in order to be jointly granted the award.
Machine Listening
Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray (b.1977), James Parker (b.1983) and Joel Stern (b. 1979), Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and experimentation, focused on the computation, capture and control of sound and speech. The collectives’ research and writing has concentrated on topics including accent bias, audio event detection, music information retrieval, and automated voice diagnostics, including how practices like these were mediated by the pandemic, which has been a constant backdrop. Machine Listening situate this material in relation to the entwined histories of speech recognition and computer music. Machine Listening have produced an online library and an interview series, staged lectures and performance programs, made artworks, films, and an ‘instrument’ for composing with audio and video via text. All of this material has been gathered online as an expanded ‘curriculum’.
Sean Dockray is an artist and writer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG. Sean is currently Senior Lecturer, Department of Fine Art at the Monash University.
James Parker is is an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA fellow at Melbourne Law School. His work explores the relations between law, sound and listening. James is author of Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP 2015) and, with Joel Stern, co-curator of Eavesdropping, an exhibition and extensive public program staged at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in 2018 and City Gallery, Wellington in 2019.
Joel Stern is a researcher, curator, and artist and currently holds the position of Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in School of Media & Communication, RMIT University. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. Stern was Artistic Director of pioneering Australian sonic art organisation Liquid Architecture, 2013–2022.
Martin Disley [Unit Test]
Martin Disley is an artist, researcher and developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His visual practice centres around an ongoing critical investigation into machine learning. His work has focussed on the machine learning model and the map-territory relation, feedback loops in inference, behavioural conditioning and training and machine learning in states of incoherence. His work seeks to manifest the internal contradictions and logical limitations of artificial intelligence in beguiling images, video and sound.
Martin was recently selected to participate in arebyte Gallery’s Hotel Generation artist development programme. He was previously artist-in-residence at the National Library of Scotland and has received commissions from The Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, The Indeterminacy Research Group at the University of Dundee and Extinction Rebellion among others. He has presented/exhibited work at Unsound Festival (Krakow, Poland), the V&A Museum (Dundee, Scotland), The Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, Scotland), Guterhallen Gallery (Soligen, Germany) and Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Ghent, Belgium).
He is a co-founder, alongside Murad Khan, of the research studio, Unit Test, which explores the place of investigative methods in counter data-science practices.
Michael Flexer
Dr. Michael Flexer a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter and director for engagement at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, where he was previously the publicly engaged research fellow in the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project. His research and teaching interests include: semiotics; mental health and particularly ‘psychosis’; time; the medical encounter and diagnosis; Marxist and (post)structuralist critical theories. His monograph on the semiotics of schizophrenia – The Madness of Meaning – is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press.
Pip Thornton
Dr. Pip Thornton is a Chancellor’s Fellow in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. Her theory and practice explore the politics of existence in online spaces, critiquing and making visible structures of power within the digital economy with creative methods. She gained her PhD in Geopolitics and Cybersecurity from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2019. Her thesis, Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism, put forward a theoretical, political and creative critique of Google’s search and advertising platforms, and included an artistic intervention into Google’s monetisation of language called {poem}.py. Shown at the Edinburgh Fringe her 2019 piece Newspeak was shortlisted for the 2020 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology and was awarded an honourable mention in the Surveillance Studies Network Biennial Art Competition (2020). Pip’s work has featured in WIRED UK, New Scientist, and at the Open Data Institute in London.
Rachel Maclean
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1987, artist Rachel Maclean has spent the last decade showcasing her ground-breaking work in galleries, museums, film festivals and on television. Working across a variety of media, including video, digital print and VR, she makes complex and layered works that reference politics, fairy tales, celebrity culture and more.
She has shown her work widely, both in the UK and internationally, receiving critical acclaim in the spheres of film and visual art. Her major exhibitions include solo shows at Tate Britain and National Gallery, London; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; KWM Artcentre, Beijing; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Maclean represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with her film commission Spite Your Face.
Her film, Make Me Up premiered at London Film Festival and on BBC4, then went on to screen in festivals around the world, including Rotterdam and Flying Broom International Women’s Film Festival, Turkey, where it won the International Federation of Film Critics award.
In 2013, Maclean was awarded the prestigious Margaret Tait Award. She has been twice shortlisted for the Jarman Award and achieved widespread critical praise for her film Feed Me at British Art Show 8 in 2016. Maclean has also worked on several television commissions, including Billy Connolly: Portrait of a Lifetime, BBC Scotland (2017); andThe Shopping Centre: Artist in Residence, Channel 4 (2018).
Maclean’s biggest commission to date, upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop, is on permanent display at Jupiter Artland, Scotland. The installation includes her first fully animated short film, which had its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.
Rachel’s most recent video work DUCK uses deepfake visuals and audio and is currently on show as part of a solo show If it looks like a duck… at Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany.
Ray Interactive
Brendan McCarthy and Sam Healy are the core duo behind Ray Interactive, a passionate creative-tech studio based at Lava Town in Leith.
Working at the increasingly complex intersection of computation and creation, they assist artists and organisations to bridge the gap between art, design and technology. Through installations, innovative data visualisation and bespoke software they are pushing on the ever-blurrier boundary between art and science, while questioning the role of tech in society.
They have helped to sonify the rise and fall of UK Tides, turn 110 years of data into digital sculpture and critique how Google monetises language. You’re as likely to see their work in a gallery, online or at a live event.
www.rayinteractive.org
Teodora Sinziana Fartan
*Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances Teodora cannot attend the Articulating Data symposium*
Teodora Sinziana Fartan is a researcher, computational artist and writer based in London, UK. Her work explores the new spaces of possibility opened up by collaborations between software and critical artistic practices, with a particular focus on the new modes of affective experience rendered into being by algorithms. Driven by speculative storytelling, Teodora’s practice explores the immersive, interactive and intelligent human-machine entanglements taking shape within algorithmically mediated spaces.
Teodora is currently a PhD Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image within London South Bank University, as well as a Lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
Theodore Koterwas
Theodore Koterwas is an artist working with data, physical phenomena and the human body to make things resonate. He seeks to draw critical attention to aspects of daily experience that often go unnoticed but profoundly impact on how we understand each other, technology and the environment.
He received his MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Early installations included projecting the reflection of the head of a single pin onto the heads of 45,000 others, attempting to shatter glass with amplified water drops, and filling an intimate interior space with the live sound of approaching footsteps. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco he collaborated with scientists to create digital installations exploring the science of perception. He has since produced work for the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, Aberdeen Performing Arts, artist and musician David Byrne and the Edinburgh Science Festival. His commission for the 2022 Science Festival saw an AI trained on the handwriting of astronomers scrawl near-realtime astronomical data on a large wall of carbon. His AI generated video installation The Nth Wave was shortlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology. Currently he is focused on data visceralisation: experiencing data internally. Somewhere In The Universe It Rains Diamonds (Aether) utilises computer vision to detect cosmic rays so you can feel them in your bones. When Do You Give Yourself Away? captures your pulse and galvanic skin response to generate a multisensory experience unique to you. As Creative AI Artist in Residence for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and Creative Informatics he is investigating AI through the human body, haptics and gesture.
For the 2023 Articulating Data Symposium he is critically examining the voice models underlying virtual assistants to repurpose them for interactions based on empathy rather than servitude.
Wesley Goatley
Wesley Goatley is a sound artist and researcher based in London, UK.
His critical practice examines the aesthetics and politics of data, machine learning, and voice recognition technologies and the power they have in shaping the world and our understanding of it. He has given talks on these subjects at international events such as Milan Design Week, Global Art Forum Singapore, CTM Festival Berlin, and the European Data Forum in Eindhoven. His writing has featured in arts magazines, academic journals, and news outlets. He has been a consultant for organisations such as BBC R&D and the University of the Creative Arts, London.
His work is exhibited and performed internationally, including venues such as Eyebeam in New York, Berghain in Berlin, The Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He has a 25-year background as an experimental performer and musician, including for labels such as Kranky (US) and Southern (UK). He was awarded an EMARE/EMAP residency prize with Impakt Festival in 2017, and has been artist in residence at Extrapool Nijmegen and Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.
He holds a doctorate in Creative and Critical Practice for his practice-led thesis titled ‘Critical data aesthetics: Towards a critically reflexive practice of data aestheticisation‘. He is Course Leader of MA Interaction Design at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.