Vicky Clarke - "Aura Machine" | UnSuperviSed, FutureMusic #3

Artistic Statement / Programme Note:
"AURA MACHINE”
‘’The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.”
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
A sound object has an aura. Taking the starting point of the sound object, a sonic fragment or atom of authentic matter, what happens to this materiality when processed by a neural network? What new sonic materials and aesthetics will emerge? Can the AI system project newly distilled hybrid forms or will the process of data compression result in lo-fi statistical imitation?
For this piece, my first experiment with neural synthesis, I sought to collide the
two disciplines of musique concrete and machine learning to take the listener on a journey through the process of training a SampleRNN model.
A tale of two states, AURA MACHINE begins with the training data, the original source
material comprising the concrete dataset. Field recordings were categorised into distinct classes; ‘Echoes of Industry’ (Manchester mill spaces),
‘Age of Electricity’ (DIY technology, noise & machinery) and ‘Materiality’
glass fragments and metal sound sculptures. The second state is the purely generated AI output audio. Can a machine produce an aura?”
Mastered by Katie Tavini
Mixing in collaboration with Guillaume Dujat

Vicky Clarke: Biography:

"Vicky 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, live AV and browser-based artwork. Vicky won the Oram Award 2020 for innovation in sound
and music technology and is working towards her first album. She is currently artist in residence at NOVARS
research centre, University of Manchester exploring musique concrete and machine learning. The residency
builds on her AI research trip to St Petersburg/Moscow as a selected artist for UK-RUSSIA Year of Music,
British Council and her project “MATERIALITY” exploring sound sculpture as a gestural and acoustic medium
to interface the physical and digital; collaborating with researchers at the National Graphene Institute, she
developed a conductive graphene performance interface for Ableton Live. Her work has featuredon
“SONIC FUTURES: How technology is guiding electronic music”, British Council and “Artist DIY” for FACT
magazine in 2020. As director of Noise Orchestra and as a solo artist Vicky has performed/exhibited with
National Science & Media Museum, MUTEK, CTM, Q02 and is an AMPLIFY DAI artist, a programme
connecting the work of women artists in UK, Argentina and Canada supported by MUTEK, Somerset House
Studios and British Council.
Website: www.vickyclarke.org
Social Media:
Twitter: @vickyclarke_ Insta: @vickyclarke_sound