Feronia Wennborg

The first electronic speech synthesiser the Voder, presented in 1939, was operated by twenty-eight women working as telephone switchboard operators at Bell Laboratories. The workers were under sharp surveillance by the company, restricted in their interactions and body movements, and subjected to linguistic training to shape the use of their tongue, lips, jaws, and posture.

At Creative Lab, Feronia Wennborg will research speech synthesis and translations between body movement and voice acts, working with collaborating artists to create an archive of phonetic and nonlinguistic voice recordings. Drawing from the research, Feronia will develop scores as instructions for multiple performers and programming software, where voices move between somatic and electronic bodies, slipping in and out of language.

Feronia Wennborg is an artist based in Glasgow, interested in the capacities of sound to carry and construct desire and subjectivity. Feronia's work has recently been exhibited and performed at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow; Visarte, Lausanne; Radiophrenia CCA, Glasgow and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.