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Lottie Sebes

Lottie Sebes

PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of the Arts & Media

Email: l.sebes@unsw.edu.au

Website: www.lottiesebes.com

Supervisors: Andrew Brooks, Anna Munster

Lottie Sebes is a sound artist and researcher whose work investigates the historical entanglements of technology and power. Drawing on media archaeological approaches, she examines how power structures manifest in our relationships with machines. As a practitioner, Lottie creates performances and installations that engage the clunky aliveness of outmoded mechanisms. By building sonic instruments from old and new machinery, she resists sleek techno-fetishism. Her performance tools bring body, voice, and machine noise into dialogue, foregrounding material agency and resistance. Lottie’s artistic work has been presented internationally, including at Elsewhere Living Museum (USA), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (AU), CTM Festival (DE), iMAL (BE), and iii (NL). After completing a BFA at UNSW, she completed her Honours year at Sydney College of the Arts where she was awarded the University Medal and the Eleanor Sophia Wood Postgraduate Research Scholarship. She has a Master of Art in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts from UdK Berlin, where she later worked as programme coordinator from 2023-26. She is currently a PhD candidate at UNSW Art and Design and an affiliated researcher at The Critical Media Lab Basel.

Lottie’s doctoral research traces a genealogy of voice technologies from colonial phonograph archives to AI voice synthesis, mapping the categorisation and standardisation of the voice. Within the field of Sound Art, it proposes an artistic intervention in this trajectory through re-appropriation of the phonograph and AI voice synthesis techniques in performance and installation contexts.