VERENA LERCHER
is a berlin-based sound artist, performer, and artistic researcher.
Her artistic practice focuses on a radical engagement with artificial voice as sounding potential beyond mere imitation of the supposedly human. Working between electroacoustic spatial sound composition and experimental performance, she stages voice as a techno-poetic becoming, an identity never fully resolved, suspended between human and machine, intimacy and publicness, body and algorithm, and always understood as a spatial phenomenon.
In doing so, she works across a range of audio technologies, including lo-fi turntables, echo tape machines, prepared megaphones, unstable microphone circuits and live-generated artificial voices.
is a berlin-based sound artist, performer, and artistic researcher.
Her artistic practice focuses on a radical engagement with artificial voice as sounding potential beyond mere imitation of the supposedly human. Working between electroacoustic spatial sound composition and experimental performance, she stages voice as a techno-poetic becoming, an identity never fully resolved, suspended between human and machine, intimacy and publicness, body and algorithm, and always understood as a spatial phenomenon.
In doing so, she works across a range of audio technologies, including lo-fi turntables, echo tape machines, prepared megaphones, unstable microphone circuits and live-generated artificial voices.
Following fifteen years as a performer, working among others with Christoph Schlingensief, Krystian Lupa, Katie Mitchell, Wojtek Klemm, Anna Mahler and Alexandre Giesche, she completed a postgraduate degree at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
In 2021, she received the prestigious AHRC Techné Scholarship for a practice-based doctorate at the University of Roehampton, London. Within the framework of this artistic research scholarship, works produced between 2021 and 2025 were shown at, among others, the New York Electronic Music Festival, Kontakte Festival Berlin, steirischer herbst Graz, the programme of Club exit Glasgow, PACT Zollverein Essen, Art Week Berlin, Spreehalle Berlin, and as part of the SAM residency at the Singapore Art Museum.
In 2023, the Goethe-Institut funded a month-long tour of New Zealand, during which she presented her vocal
performances and led workshops at, among other venues, Victoria University of Wellington, the Physics Room Christchurch, Audio Foundation Auckland and the Adam Art Gallery.
Shorter research grants from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport have also taken her to Tokyo, Bangalore and Chicago since 2017.
In June 2025, she completed her doctorate with distinction; her dissertation, 'Sounding Out Identities of Artificial Voice', was presented alongside a solo exhibition at Funkhaus Berlin.
In 2026, she established her own laboratory for AI-based vocal transformation processes at Funkhaus Berlin, in collaboration with the Department of Audio Communication at Technical University Berlin and Angela McArthur, Head of the Immersive Spatial Practices programme in the Department of Anthropology at UCL London.
KEY ASPECTS OF ACTIVITY
- AI-voice performance and human-machine co-composition
- Techno-imagination as artistic-theoretical method
- Critical engagement with corporate control and gatekeeping in AI art
- The aesthetics of the inComplete in artificial voice
- Artistic research on voice as an ongoing process of individuation
www.verenalercher.com
