Amanda Turner Pohan: Alexa Echoes

Amanda Turner Pohan, Alexa Echoes, 2021
EMPAC (Troy, NY)
February 4, 2021

Film by Amanda Turner Pohan, co-curated by Muheb Esmat, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, Rachel Vera Steinberg, and me, with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

Link to work, followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and me.
Link to exhibition web page.

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa.

In this film, EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer) is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

Image: Amanda Turner Pohan, Alexa Echoes, 2021 (still). Photo courtesy the artist.