6:00pm-7:00pm on Thursday 19 March
Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).
Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English 9 West Road, CB3 9DP
This participatory performance explores how sound generation can act as a critical technical practice. Using wearable sensors, it transforms participants’ physiological rhythms, such as pulse, into sound, weaving them together with AI-generated sonic material trained on audio recordings of historic socio-political events. The result is a shifting acoustic environment where personal and collective intensities merge, inviting audiences to experience the interdependence between body, technology and memory. The performance asks how the act of sensing – both through machines and through the body – can become a means of connecting to histories of resistance, vulnerability and care.
The Body and the Archive proposes listening and sound-making as acts of witnessing and reciprocity. By layering traces of human physiology as a form of sensory engagement with AI-generated echoes of past struggles, the performance constructs a circular loop between body and the machine. As participants contribute with their bodily rhythms to shape a shared sonic field, they affect and are affected by the presence of the sound.
Beyond the individual dynamics, the performance creates a collective environment shaped by shared sonic material and the act of exchanging the wearable. The interplay between participants’ embodiment and the generative sound hence produces a form of co-creation where an emotional atmosphere is lived, heard and felt collectively across time, difference and distance.
