Lottie Sebes’ Veritas Ventriloquist is a sonic performance which questions, transforms, and harnesses the historical entanglements of gender, voice and technology. At the core of this performance is the Veritas Machine - a noisy, dynamic, woman-machine interface made of dismantled and reforged sewing machines, re-envisioned as an instrument and vocal synthesiser. This instrument is a set, an apparatus and a relational system of technological components which have been predominantly used by women in history.

Loops of archival material and electromagnetic sounds are wound through the mechanisms of the sewing machines, combined with their hacked foot pedals, resonating in Sebes’ oral cavity. The body becomes the sounding chamber for a genealogy where machines and media have historically impressed their gendered codes. Choking and aggression seep between the cracks of feminised postures and glances. The ventriloquised noise of the machine erupts through the mouth to form a shared agency through which a cyborg voice can defy the boundaries of its own gendered history.

Lottie Sebes is a sound artist from Australia whose works encompass performance, installation, sound and sculpture. Questioning the idea of technological ‘progress’, investigates the interrelation of technologies, histories and socio-cultural norms, combining old and new to uncover the perpetual recycling and transformation of ideas throughout the history of science and technology. Sebes approaches sound as a combined manifestation of our human expressions, our bodies, and the specificities of the machines used to amplify and record them. Her installations have been exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (AU), Elsewhere Museum (USA), and the CHB Berlin (DE), and she has performed for audiences at Experimance Festival (DE), Sonoscopia (PT), and Antre Peaux (FR).

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