

Past Exhibitions of Motheroid:
- OFFICIAL SELECTION at Athens Digital Arts Festival 2024
- OFFICIAL SELECTION at ViennaShorts 2024
A collaboration with the media artist Anke Schiemann with the support of Musikfonds eV. as part of the Neustart Kultur program.
"In the iconography of the minor story, most sirens do in fact still sing but no longer narrate. Nor do they know everything like their ancient mothers. Sinuous, disheveled and pisciform - as the Homeric monsters were no longer - in addition to their song, they now seduce men for their beauty. The fascination of the voice, made even more disturbing by the absence of words, and the lure of the man to the total pleasure, often openly erotic, still direct the marine scene of seduction. [...] There is a female voice that seduces to death, and has no words." Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell'espressione vocale Feltrinelli, Milano 2003.
Manuel García II (1805–1906) has been a widely influential voice teacher. In addition to inventing the laryngoscope, García taught vocal pedagogy at the Paris Conservatory and at London’s Royal Academy of Music. While his work on vocal pedagogy is quite well known even to this day, little has been written or researched about the colonial context in which his research on the physiology of the voice took place.
He also took part in the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 where he was able to gain some surgical experience in French military hospitals. In Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds: An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound, Mickey Vallee proposes the term “laryngealcentric voice” to refer to “the voice brought through technics into the light of science”, whereby “the voice became a knowable object by virtue of its discovery through the technical tools that isolated the voice in the throat”.
(i) A colonial epistemology that situated voice and power only in the racial, gendered, and class figure of male white men as human and (ii) a colonial sensory order that insisted on the discretion of sensory experiences, brought the elaboration of the vocal apparatus by scientists and pedagogues in the mid-to-late 19th century. The voice became a technology for asserting colonial difference (Blake 2022).
Together with other scientists of his time, he also conducted experiments on dissected organs of animals. In The Philosophy of the Human Voice, James Rush writes: “They [scientists] have removed the organs from men and other animals, and have produced something like their natural voices by blowing
through them. They have inspected and named the curious structure of the cartilages and muscles of the larynx, with the absurd purpose to discover thereby the cause of intonation. In short, they have tried to see sound, and to touch it with the dissecting knife. (1827: 4)”.
Blake, I. S. (2022), The vocal apparatus’ colonial contexts. France’s mission civilisatrice and (settler) colonialism in Algeria and North America; in Sonic Histories of Occupation, London: Bloomsbury.
Rush, J. (1827), The Philosophy of the Human Voice: Embracing its Physiological History; Together with a System of Principles by which Criticism in the Art of Elocution May be Rendered Intelligible, and Instruction, Definite and Comprehensive, to which is Added a Brief Analysis of Song and Recitative, Philadelphia, PA: J. Maxwell.
Vallee, M. (2019), Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds: An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
Upcoming: New album: Hyperclassics v.1 \\\\\\\\\ Upcoming: New album: Hyperclassics v.1
Upcoming: My first album “HYPERKLASSIꓘ V.1” is coming very soon! // “motheroid” is going to be showed in a 4-channel audio installation in Taipei @ 2024 Future Media Fest from October 4 to December 15.
Album presentation of “HYPERKLASSIꓘ V.1”, Sunday, 13.10.24, Morphine Raum, with AIEL, KC and visuals by Cẩm-Anh Lương
MOTHEROID
MOTHEROID
Upcoming: New album: Hyperclassics v.1 \\\\\\\\\ Upcoming: New album: Hyperclassics v.1
Album presentation of “HYPERKLASSIꓘ V.1”, Sunday, 13.10.24, Morphine Raum, with AIEL, KC and visuals by Cẩm-Anh Lương