Exhibition Preview | LATENT SPACES, Vicky Clarke (SONAMB)

About this Event

Join us for a special exhibition preview of Latent Spaces - the first solo installation from Vicky Clarke. Latent Spaces is a spatial sound installation that invites you to step inside the Aura Machine - an imaginary computer model to experience a machine language in flux, shaped from echoes of industry.

Latent Spaces is a 20 min sound installation that runs every half an hour. Tickets are free but booking is essential due to limited capacity in Seesaw Basement.

6.30pm: Bar opens

7pm: Latent Spaces: Showing 1

7.30pm: Q&A with Sound & Music UK & Vicky Clarke

8pm: Latent Spaces: Showing 2

8.30pm Latent Spaces: Showing 3

About the Exhibition

Vicky Clarke: LATENT SPACES _Step inside a computer model

Exhibition Open: Friday 24th October (10-5pm) & Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th (11-3.30pm)

We're surrounded by invisible technological systems where machine learning and covert algorithms shape our everyday lives. At the heart of these systems is Latent Space, a data dimension in a state of flux, where material becomes data, past meets future, and new machine languages emerge. How do we imagine these spaces? What do they sound like?

Latent Spaces is a sound installation that invites the audience to step inside the Aura Machine – an imaginary computational model combining spatial audio, sculpture and digital objects. Once inside the machine, experience a materiality in flow, where sonic echoes of past technological eras emerge, morph and fall apart.

Audiences will be immersed in the emerging machine language through an industrial soundscape of Manchester mill sounds, cotton machinery from Quarry Bank MIll, and the material sounds of electricity, glass and metal. These sounds – field recordings captured by the artist – make up the machine’s dataset, used to train an early lo-fi neural synthesis model called PRiSM SampleRNN, now itself a historical relic.

Occupying a heritage textile building, the work layers a virtual, imaginary space over a real, physical space of industry.

We are living in the era of Latent Space - - - Read more about Latent Spaces here

About the Artist

Vicky Clarke (aka SONAMB) is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester, UK. Latent Spaces is her first solo installation, and marks the third in a series of works exploring machine learning and musique concréte. Clarke’s research in this area began in 2019. through a British Council research trip to Russia and an artistic residency with NOVARS, University of Manchester in collaboration with PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music. Here she developed methods of building custom datasets of her own recordings and explored what happens to the materiality of sound in neural networks to create ‘AURA MACHINE’, her live AV piece was recently released on LOL Editions label. This was followed by ‘NEURAL MATERIALS’, a Cyborg Soloist commission, from University of Holloway and UKRI, to develop a performance system for AI, sculpture and electronics. Latent Spaces draws on post industrial sounds from these projects including cotton mill machinery from Quarry Bank Mill where her father trained as an apprentice electrical engineer. During her research, Clarke became interested in latent space, with its unknowable qualities and language of ‘hidden layers.’ Drawn to the idea of ‘statistical alchemy’, she was fascinated by the sound world of neural synthesis, and the visual representations of latent space in Machine Learning text books. She began to imagine what it might be like to step inside.

artist website: vickyclarke.org follow on instagram: @sonamb__

Supporters

This work was made possible by Sound and Music's In Motion programme. In Motion 2024 is supported by Arts Council England, Jerwood Foundation, Garrick Club Charitable Trust, PRS Foundation & Marchus Trust.

Sound and Music is a PRS Foundation Talent Development Network Partner supported by PPL UK.

With exhibition support from FutureEverything, as part of the Innovate UK-funded Cultural Accelerator programme