Investigating a Domestic Vocal System | Winter Residencies 2024 | Watershed
Channel: Watershed
Date: 26/03/2024

Investigating a Domestic Vocal System is an artwork that explores how spaces can be given 'voice'. 

Dave Evans is an artist based in Liverpool who builds networked artworks that explore how things such as people, places and technologies are connected together. Dave has significant caring responsibilities that require him to spend a lot of time in the home. Whilst there, Dave noticed a design ‘feature’ of domestic objects is to be quiet and unobtrusive, contributing to socio-cultural conventions that domestic work and, by extension, caregiving should be quiet, and the people (traditionally women) and things associated with it should make as little sound as possible. Dave is interested in pushing back against these social cultural frameworks to explore how traditionally quiet or silent assemblages of domestic devices can be ‘given voice’ and allowed to ‘speak’ beyond the home. 

About Watershed’s Residency Programmes: 

Watershed’s annual Winter Residencies programme is an opportunity for artists to develop incredible ideas at the Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed’s creative technologies research space. The programme supports creative practitioners from varied disciplines, career stages and backgrounds, who have ideas for projects that blend art and technology.  

In 2024 residency artists responded to the theme of ‘Other Minds’, a theme in which we sought work exploring intelligences that are different to human intelligence: animals, machines, or something stranger. 

We asked questions such as: What does it mean to live in a world filled with different forms of thought? How can we create an idea of humanness within computer networks, beehives, or forests, while still maintaining our essential humanity? And how can we use ideas like "artificial intelligence" to expand our understanding of the world, rather than creating new ways to exploit it? These are the kinds of questions we were thinking about, and we invited artists to bring their own. 

About Watershed: 

Watershed is a three-screen cinema in Bristol UK showing independently produced films from Britain and beyond. We are also a centre for art and creative technology: home to the Pervasive Media Studio, where artists, technologists and academics work on projects and products at the cutting edge of art, science and digital. 

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