Tune in for a special live stream of "Home Song #1" by Dave Evans.

"Home Song #1" is the first of a series of live choral performances by a house in Liverpool, UK, with artist Dave Evans. In these hour-long broadcasts ordinarily quiet devices, spaces, and objects within the house are amplified and harmonized into song using sensors and mics then streamed live. "The Home Song" broadcasts are inspired by how classical metamorphosis myths, such as Plutarch’s Gryllus dialogue, offered an alternative view of the established vertical hierarchies of the time (with gods at the top, humans in the middle and animals at the bottom), suggesting, instead, a world of in a state of perpetual flux. These flows were not just an entertaining gimmick, but recognized other ways of being together, and the strengths of these worlds. "Home Song #1" adapts these myths to present an alternative to the hierarchies implicit in the contemporary flows of capital, objects, and labor as they are played out in the home. Instead of being silent, a fridge sings of ice and freon, a router sings of packets of data coming and going, a washing machine sings about the love embedded in making mucky things fresh and clean for a new day, and these songs combine to produce a chorus that meets the world through the throat of a live stream over the internet. The results are unpredictable, but the process of playing out this metamorphosis, of a silent and passive house into a chorus of singing and active agents, invites us to think differently about the complexities of love and care, of identities forming and dissolving, despite the expectations and demands of capital.

Dave Evans is an artist based in Liverpool. He makes work that explores how things are connected together. He enjoys building artworks that cross conventional binaries, physical/digital and human/non-human, to celebrate and reveal the complex entanglements he finds himself in. Recently he was selected for the Winter Residency at the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed in Bristol to Investigate a Domestic Vocal System. Other recent projects have included Edge Hill Garden Network, with Metal Liverpool, which was a solar powered a wireless local area network that connected a permaculture garden in a train station to commuters waiting for their trains. Dave has also presented his work and research internationally at conferences such as Radical Networks in NYC and the Politics of Machines in Copenhagen. He was awarded a PhD in 2022 from Goldsmiths, University of London, that investigated retreat as a creative strategy and how artists can build digital networks as artworks.

https://vocal.systems/