In Alexa Echoes (2020), Amanda Turner Pohan weaves the ever-renewed legend of women being transformed into sound alone. The film, akin to a chamber opera, features original compositions by Charlie Looker, choreography by Dages Juvelier Keates, and performance by Katy Pinke. Beginning on the basis of the Greek myth of Echo and ending with Amazon’s Alexa, the film examines and, eventually, contributes to, the disembodiment of feminine beings. The audience is implicated in this transformation, and is left to wonder how it will continue in the next generation of technology.
:::
:::
Check out Amanda Turner Pohan‘s Q + A.
:::
Amanda Turner Pohan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work uses the body’s complicated relationship to technology as source material for embodiment research. Pohan’s practice is curious about the ways in which bodies are shaped by, metabolize, and access power. Working from within a queer feminist framework, Pohan has been exploring automation, animation, and mimicry within low and high technologies of image and voice (re)production in her film and video practice. Most recently, Pohan has been exploring the ways in which voice-based AI assistants are extensions of misogyny and white dominance in our homes.
