Lecture Performance
Drawing on Paolo Virno’s definition of virtuosity as the “activity of the speaker” capitalised under post-Fordist conditions, this lecture-performance investigates artificial voices that now extend to both human and artificial actors. While commercial AI voices are streamlined and commodified by economic power structures, this lecture claims the potential of the incomplete as a valid form of knowledge generation to allow the emergence of multiplicity that risks being neutralised under the current techno-capitalist paradigm.
In a hybrid arrangement, the theoretical lecture is interwoven with selected scenes from the performance Murmur and VoXations—Solids of Mutation. The lecture does not operate as a detached commentary, but as part of an electroacoustic feedback system consisting of a broken DJ set, voice synthesis code, analog tape echoes, and the IKOsahedral loudspeaker, using beamforming to project phantom sound sources onto the room’s reflective surfaces.
Verena Lercher’s artistic practice centres on a techno-cognitive engagement with artificial voice-sound phenomena to construct vocal identities as a poetic navigation between the private and public, the human and the technological, the body and the algorithm. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the New York Electronic Music Festival, Kontakte Festival Berlin, steirischer herbst Graz, EXIT-club Glasgow, and the Singapore Art Museum. Research fellowships have also taken her to Tokyo, Bangalore, and Chicago. In 2025, she completed her PhD entitled “Sounding Out Identities of Artificial Voice.”
Webpage: www.verenalercher.com
lnstagram: @verena_lercher
Lecture Performance: October 16, 3 pm / Flutgraben
RELATED EVENTS:
Symposium exhibition: October 2. until 17. / Flutgraben – Projektraum
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Photo: Gerriet Krishna Sharma ©