INHABIT #3 // Pedro Oliveira

May – August 2020

Pedro Oliveira is a sound artist and researcher who is mainly concerned with acts of sonic violence and colonial articulations of listening. His work inquires the materiality of sonic archives in the realm of political surveillance.

At the centre of his artistic and scientific work is the examination of speech recognition technologies, more specifically the so-called automated "accent recognition" software, which is used by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) to determine the origin of asylum seekers. Oliveira investigates acts of collecting, organizing and taxonomizing vocal traits and their violent usage in systematically categorising individuals. His artistic interventions into the material embody an understanding of listening as a critical practice in which stories are told through gaps found in the archive (or database).

During his residence he will continue working on his research on the deployment of sonic biometric technologies to further understand how machine listening can be instrumentalized as a violent and dehumanizing device when embedded into asylum procedures. He will more specifically work on the notion of “distortion” as a set of material and discursive techniques (e.g.distortion as a character present in the timbral matter of voice itself) to critically challenge the workings of speech analysis systems.

Biography

Pedro Oliveira holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin, as well as an MA in Digital Media from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen and has most recently worked as lecturer and research associate in Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf. He is also a founding member of the platform Decolonising Design. He has participated in international exhibitions as well as performances at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; IASPIS, Stockholm; HKW, Berlin; transmediale Festival, Berlin, Deutschlandradio Kultur;  ctm Festival, Berlin (HAU2);  Goethe-Institut Brussels, Belgium; sonorities Festival, Belfast; ACUD Macht Neu, Berlin