Vicky Clarke

Vicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester UK, whose work explores materiality, electrical phenomena and ritual, and networked cultures. Working with sound sculpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she explores our relationship to technology considering themes of human agency in autonomous systems, post-industrialisation and the techno-emotional states we experience through these interactions. Her work takes the form of composition and live AV performance, DIY machines & sculpture, digital art & research. Vicky won the Oram Award 2020 for innovation in sound and music technology from PRS Foundation and the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She produces music under the moniker SONAMB and her debut album, SLEEPSTATES, a ‘glitchy experimental techno jerker’(Boomkat) was released in 2022, accompanied by net-art piece SLEEPSTATES.NET exploring machine addiction, sleep territories and sonic algorithmic control. Most recently she has been artist in residence with NOVARS, University of Manchester, exploring the collision of musique concrete & machine learning in collaboration with PRiSM, Royal Northern College of Music, considering how neural networks and concrete materials can project future sonic realities (see research site).The residency was part of the European Art-Science-technology Network for Digital Creativity 2020 – 2021. Her live AV piece, AURA MACHINE, which takes the listener on a journey through training a neural network, premiered on Factmag’s Patch Notes series and was performed at the Science & Industry Museum for Future of Sound LATES and Future Music#3, RNCM. This area of specialism builds on her AI research trip to St Petersburg as selected artist for British Council’s UK-Russia Year of Music collaborating with artists and technologists in Moscow and St Petersburg and ‘AI and neural networks’ study with KIM, University of Karlsruhe. Vicky is currently developing this work as a new live performance system working with gestural sensors as part of a ‘Cyborg Soloists commission. As a solo artist and with her duo electronics Noise Orchestra Vicky has performed and exhibited at the National Science & Media Museum, MUTEK Montreal and Barcelona, CTM, STEIM and QO2. Vicky is a selected artist on the AMPLIFY Digital Artist Initiative, an artist development programme promoting and connecting the work of women identifying artists in UK, Argentina and Canada supported by MUTEK Festival, Somerset House Studios and British Council and is part of Sound Obsessed, a Berlin based collective of sonic innovators, coders and scientists, contributing to the sonic innovation archive.