Fellow, Artist Fellow 2023-2024
Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira conducts research about voice biometrics and migration. His academic as well as artistic work in the field of sound art examines the act of listening and its implications on racialized violence and the policing of bodies in border spaces. With his current project on dialect-recognition software he examines against the backdrop of global migration and refugee movements in Germany those inscriptions that accompany the digitalisation of the human voice in border control techniques. In experimental, discursive-poetic and theoretical constellations, he takes his research beyond traditional academic analyses to include and make use of praxis-as-theory as an imperative. Next to and in relation with his academic work he presents his artistic interventions as sound installations, performances, radio art and audio essays. Also, he is a founding member of the research platform Decolonising Design.
Abstract
Border Voices, Unknown Spectres
How do machines listen to, and consequently (re)make, the “human”? How can these listenings and makings be completely undone? My current project comprises both academic and artistic work around so-called dialect recognition software, a proprietary solution in use by the German Ministry of Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) in cases of undocumented asylum seekers in Germany. It is by understanding this dialect recognition software as a material-discursive space in which a (colonial) model of what a dialect is and should be is applied that I articulate questions about the meaning of listening, voice, migration and “being human.” The focus is to demonstrate how an anticolonial engagement with machine listening complicates, challenges and often refuses what colonial and scientific paradigms have sought to establish as cogent modes of listening to the voice and how this listening sediments and, consequently, defines the migrant body. The main goal is to work on a monograph articulating a series of new theoretical and poetic propositions on the idea of spectralization. Such a poetic-theoretical potential might be only achievable through engaging with the “spectral domain” from an anticolonial ethos.
Education
2017 PhD Design Research, Berlin University of the Arts
2012 MA Digital Media, University of the Arts, Bremen
2008 BA Visual Communication, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Bauru
2002 Diploma Electronics, Colégio Técnico Industrial, Bauru
Most Recent Academic Position
Senior Lecturer for Sound Studies, Berlin University of the Arts
Most Recent Publications
With Miyazaki, Shintaro. "Maschinelle Intelligenz?!", In: “Acoustic Intelligence: Hören und Gehorchen”, edited by Anna Schürmer, Maximilian Haberer and Tomy Brautschek, 99–124. Berlin, Boston: Düsseldorf Univerity Press 2022.
“'offensichtlich unbegründet': a work in progress meditation on sonic biometry, migration and the archive”. In: “Postcolonial Repercussions: On Sound Ontologies and Decolonised Listening”, edited by Ismaiel-Wendt Johannes Salim and Andi Schoon,77–84. Bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022.
With Lee, Peggy, Kyoungwon, Osman, Shanti Suki and Marie Thompson. “A Conversation on Race, Sound, and the Im/possibility of Decolonised Listening”, In: “Postcolonial Repercussions: On Sound Ontologies and Decolonised Listening,” edited by Ismaiel-Wendt, Johannes Salim and Andi Schoon, 45–58. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022.
Most Recent Activities
Exhibition participation "Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings" at the Akademie der Künste Berlin.
until 9 July
aianarchies.net/broken-machines-and-wild-imaginings
Participation in the panel discussion "Situated Soundknowledge" and sound performance at the festival "Blaues Rauschen" in Bochum.
14 June
blauesrauschen.de/programm/
Exhibition "on damp earths we wander" in the Lantz'scher Park in Düsseldorf.
until 15 September
www.kunstkommission-duesseldorf.de/projekte/lantzscher-skulpturenpark/
Performance at the Festaval "Between Land and Sea" in Palermo, Italy.
24 June
studiorizoma.org/editorial/pedro-oliveira-desmonte/
Performance at the Beek, Hamburg.
9 July
beeek.de/09-07-23