Voyce Walker

This four-channel audio installation presents a speculative reimagining of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), transposing the novel's post-nuclear themes into a contemporary framework addressing climate collapse and technological failure. Staged using vintage radio equipment at the National Communication Museum, the work explores temporal displacement and the mythologisation of societal breakdown.

The installation employs AI voice cloning technology and analogue synthesisers to create what the artist terms "voice puppetry," investigating questions of agency, manipulation, and technological mediation. The narrative framework envisions a post-carbon-capitalist world where advanced computing has vanished, language has degraded, and survivors organise around "The User Story" - a mythical account of civilisational collapse broadcast through salvaged radio infrastructure.

This "voyce walking" - the work's central conceit - operates as both content delivery mechanism and metaphor for how narratives shape collective understanding of crisis. The deliberate use of vintage radio equipment creates temporal confusion, evoking radio's various "golden ages" while positioning the medium as crude post-apocalyptic technology. Cloned synthetic voices deliver fragmented prophecies of "infomayshun barms," creating uncanny juxtapositions between historical broadcasting aesthetics and speculative futures.

The work functions as critical media archaeology, examining how technological systems both enable and constrain narrative possibility. By staging dystopian fiction through obsolete broadcast technology, the installation questions the relationship between medium and message, while exploring how contemporary anxieties about AI, climate change, and technological dependence might be understood through the lens of earlier speculative fiction.