Art und Weise: Beyond the Aperture

Beyond the Aperture examines how Victoria Keddie's practice navigates the shifting landscape of machine perception and data collection through sound, installation, and performance.
Moving beyond traditional optical recording, Keddie's work reveals how contemporary surveillance and information systems generate new forms of seeing and knowing that transcend human visual perception. Through projects like Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti and Pshal P'shaw, she transforms invisible streams of information—from orbital debris trajectories to neural language patterns—into immersive sonic and visual experiences that make tangible the hidden architectures of our data-mediated world.
In conversation with curator and media historian Liz Flyntz, Keddie will discuss her methodologies for translating machine-gathered data into experiential artworks. The talk involves a live performance demonstrating these transformative processes in real time.
Works of focus:
1. Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti (2022-2023) This work demonstrates the transition beyond optical surveillance through its real-time tracking and sonifi cation of space debris. The piece creates an immersive environment where orbital data becomes an experiential soundscape, making tangible the usually invisible layers of technological debris that encircle our planet. Its exploration of coordinates, proximity, and variance in Low Earth Orbit directly engages with questions of machine perception beyond traditional visual recording.
2. Sensory Feedback (2022-2023) This multi-channel sound installation, created for KØS Museum, offers a case study in architectural sensing and environmental data collection. Through exploring Ant Farm's "Art Building" at Antioch College, Keddie used microphones and environmental sensors to capture the building's sonic and atmospheric properties, creating an archaeological portrait through non-visual means.
3. Pshal P'shaw (2024) As her most recent work, this 12-channel sound installation represents a sophisticated synthesis of machine learning and phonetic data. Its exploration of neural networks and language processing systems highlights the causal relationships between phonetic evolution, technological interventions, and the evolving, uncontainable human experience of phonetic sounding. The work's transformation of phoneme data into spatial sound demonstrates how machine perception operates at levels beyond human sensory capabilities.

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut New York