During the residency, Augustė Vickunaitė will expand her sound performance practice into a more theatrical, scenographic, and installation-based approach. Since 2016, she has worked with reel-to-reel tape recorders, exploring the interplay between analog technology, human experience, and the imperfections of decaying machines. She aims to transform these machines into autonomous characters, using lighting, costumes, and installation setups to create a darkly humorous and uncanny scenography, by collecting field recordings from Brussels using a portable reel-to-reel recorder and transform parts of these recordings into the soundscape of her work. Vickunaitė explores the tension between modern ideals of technological perfection and the imperfections of outdated devices. This tension will be a key focus of her performance, highlighting the absurd and humorous side of machines attempting to “become human” while constantly failing.

Augustė Vickunaitė aims to create a playful and mysterious performance where the machines’ malfunctions evoke both laughter and discomfort. The scenography will be shaped by the interactions between machines, lighting, costumes and the degraded sound of analog tapes. These elements will explore the blurred boundaries between human and machine, organic and artificial. By the end of the residency, she will develop a performance combining sound art, humor, and theatricality, using obsolete technology to explore human fragility.

Augustė Vickunaitė is a sound experimentalist with a background in physics. Augustė exclusively employs vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record, and create sounds, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, music instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. Auguste specializes in tape music, noise, and collage music, known for her theatrical and darkly humorous approach, often exploiting errors of analog audio equipment. Her solo work encompasses tape loops and collages of found audio tapes.

Her notable performances include appearances at venues such as Studium P and Retrito Smarsas in Vilnius, Cafe Oto in London, Km28 and Volksbuehne (Psychic Liberation series at Roter Salon) in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and many others. She has also participated in festivals like Seanaps (Leipzig), Braille Satellite (Lithuania), and Troglobatem (Stuttgart), Gražuolė Smegduobė (Lithuania) and has created Radio art works for Radio Art Zone in Esch, Luxembourg; Cashmere Radio in Berlin; Rasų Radijas in Vilnius; KunstRadio in Vienna, among others.

Residency in the framework of tekhnē, funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.