Whispering Winds
Experimentations in performance to screen, 2024-25
Last year I started making this bonkers music video art piece. I guess maybe you'd categorise it as a performance piece to video but really I was just pissing about in my living room getting all antsy with the adhD and finding an outlet with a bottle of wine and some weird ideas.
What I really wanted to do was sing a song and I'd been biiiiIIIiingIInng Aldous Harding so obvs wanted to do something in her style but the PROBLEM is that I can't play any instruments bc my wee fingers hurt from geetar strings.
Anywho this AI generating tool can't make instrumental songs so instead it make a vocal song where the lyrics actually are instructions on how to write a song in the style of Aldous Harding (meta). I popped on me cowboy hat coz it fit the vibe then got my kiddos baby dolly and played at being a mum and then accidentally made some weird Clockwork Orange type character dancing in a bathtub.
I'm a thinker through making, right (learnt that recently...fuck essays now or maybe not who cares?) and as I was making this I was like oooh yh baby, layers. Gender, AI, m*therhood... it's all. kinda. not. real. it's. all. kinda. performance. Then I got to thinking about how loadsa people think AI is evil but ya know, it's not a human. It can't be evil. It's artificial. and i really love the idea that in this AI 'world' anything can be anything. nothing actually exists. i can be a coyBOY and a lady MOTHER and a wierd androgynous ugly eerie thing and no one aint gonna tell me SHIT.
I worked in some audio at the end that I recorded when little R was a tidgy lil baby and we were walking round a big echoey space at the Tate Modern and feeeEEeeling out our voices. It felt good to inject some of actual real (not thinky real) bits of my life into this as a wee like juxtaposition but also in a way, its just as eerie if not more so. It makes me feel a bit sad watching this which is funny to me bc it's also silly as fuck and stupid but summit about making it and watching it feels... important somehow?
cheers then, bye!
I’m watching this back as I updated my website in September 2026 and the cringe I feel for this piece is still super strong but there is something about it I do really love. It feels brave to me, to put myself - the image of myself and the self in my work - out there is this very raw, unrefined, diy, messy kind way.
Another thought - I clocked the probably AI generated closed captions get the words wrong at the end, on the bit of audio of me and Little R playing with our voices in that big echoey room and it adds this whole other layer to me… of layers of information, wrong interpretations, of mis-translation. The word transference came to mind, I didn’t really know what it was, so I googled it: AI overview told me ”Transference is the unconscious redirection of feelings, expectations, and relational patterns from past significant relationships—usually with childhood figures like parents—onto a new person in the present”
I would like to not use AI so much. I feel a bit guilty for using it as a tool (a medium) for this work.
A last thought - I play with gender presentation and expectations and performances. It’s important there is a 3rd character which is androgynous though I didn’t mean for it to be at the time, it was just a strange character but actually, I enjoy it takes on meaning after. You can’t really fuck with the binary while sticking with the number 2.