Victoria Evans is a contemporary artist with a background in the film and television industries. She graduated with a Masters Degree in Fine Art Practice (Sculpture) from Glasgow School of Art in 2015 and is currently conducting SGSAH/AHRC funded, practice-based PhD research at Edinburgh College of Art. Victoria has had writing published in a peer reviewed journal and several online art platforms; and has been awarded contemporary art grants, commissions and residencies in the UK from: Hospitalfield, Arbroath; VACMA, Glasgow, Design Informatics, Edinburgh; Creative Informatics in Edinburgh; LUX Scotland and BBC Arts (UK). Her artwork has been broadcast on BBC Four and on arts radio station Radiophrenia. Victoria has exhibited in Scotland, England, Greece and Spain. Most recently her sound installation Deep Space Call and Response was shown at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh.  

Victoria’s practice-based artistic research at Edinburgh College of Art asks what alternative ways of knowing might become possible through attuning our senses to the world of sound.  Engaging with science and philosophy, she uses experimental and speculative methods. Working across a variety of media, including film, sound composition, creative writing, print and digital, Victoria explores sound as a material, transcorporeal agent of connection that resonates across more-than-human scales and whispers of invisible perceptual ecologies. 

Howl is a short work of fiction set in the distant future, in the underground sonic archive of a city-state known for its radical acoustic architecture. Here, the sonic culture of the phonocene* reaches a short-lived apotheosis, before environmental changes render the city uninhabitable. A historian from a subsequent age arrives to research the city’s founder––rumoured to have died in suspicious circumstances.  But as the researcher ventures deeper into the archive her account ends abruptly, without resolution. The reader must become researcher, augmenting the narrative with clues contained in a series of opaque documents to sound out their own version of events. 

*Phonocene = a concept proposed by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret to reconfigure the Anthropocene through the more-than-human world of sound.  

The full PDF of Victoria Evans’ Howl is available for download below.