AURA MACHINE LIVE
Audiovisual film: Live recording for FACTmag Patch Notes series, 180 Studios, London
A sound object has an aura. Can a machine produce an aura?
AURA MACHINE LIVE is an audiovisual performance from Vicky’s artist residency exploring machine
learning and musique concrete at NOVARS, University of Manchester.
Incorporating live sound sculpture, DIY interfaces, modular and machine learning, the piece explores
what happens to the sound object when processed by a neural network.
Taking the listener on a journey through transmutational states, the piece begins with the concrete
training data, original source material including manchester mill spaces, machines, materials and noise
to a transmutational training state and finally a latent space exploration of purely generated AI
material.
Visuals feature Vicky’s AURA MACHINE icons, a graphical symbolic system representing the sound
object in latent space. These AI generated forms are trained on a dataset of ancient alchemical –
techno-mystical symbols, made physical in steel and neon sculpture, and form the live audio reactive
visuals as developed/performed by Sean Clarke.
Neural models used are StyleGAN2, NLP for text/voice and PRiSMSampleRNN.
Read more: www.auramachine.blog
Speaker
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Vicky ClarkeVicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester, UK. Working with sound sculpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she explores our relationship to technology through sonic materiality, Winner of the Oram Award 2020, she is currently artist in residence at NOVARS, University of Manchester exploring musique concrete and machine learning. Vicky is part of AmplifyDAI, an international programme supporting the work of women artists in sound and digital
arts in UK, Canada and Argentina with MUTEK, Somerset House Studios and British Council. She is also co-director of Noise Orchestra and the Associate Artist at FutureEverything.
EASTN-DC, European Art-Science-Technology Network for Digital Creativity, is a network dedicated to the time-based digital arts: musical arts, visual arts, performing and interactive arts. It is gathering 16 partners in 13 different countries from Europe to the Americas. They will host and exchange about 70 creators in the frame of a 16 international events tour spread over 4 years. These privileged moments, in direct contact with the audience, will frame a new and systemic approach, binding the Knowing “Disseminate”, the Learning “Inseminate”, the Making “Collect”, a digital creativity factory leading to a creative citizen.