Dr Amina Abbas-Nazari

Biography

Amina Abbas-Nazari is a practicing designer, researcher, and vocal performer.
She has researched the voice in conjunction with emerging technology, especially through practice, since 2008.
Their research and practice sit at the intersection of sound, design and technology, with a focus on the voice, speculative design and artificial intelligence technology. This work is orientated from Amina's position as a practicing vocal performer and speculative designer. Often the work intendeds to provide intersectional and more-than-human approaches to design and technology via sound and sonic thinking. Broader concepts the work engages with include: new materialism, decoloniality, queer theory, ethics, embodiment, ecology, identity and activism.

In 2024 Amina completed a PhD in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art (RCA), investigating the sound and sounding of voices in artificially intelligent conversational and machine listening systems. The transdisciplinary project utilised theory from sound and music to investigate and critique AI voice profiling practices through speculatively designed human-computer-interactions, centring the voice and sonic materiality. The conjuncture of their work in sound and design has resulted in several novel lines of theoretic and practice-based enquiry. This includes developing ideas around Speculative Voicing including Sonic Speculative Design and Sonic Speculation: employing sound and sonic thinking for speculative imaginaries, exploring the voice as a [design] material (especially in the context of AI and machine listening), and utilising the formation of choirs as a method, especially for modelling social-ecological entanglement.

Amina's work has been exhibited internationally including at the London Design Festival, Design Museum, Barbican Centre, Lisson Gallery London, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial, Channel 4 Television, Critical Media Lab, Switzerland, Litost Gallery, Prague, Pedreira, Portugal and Harvard University, America. She has performed internationally with choirs and continues to collaborate with artists as an experimental vocalist including Marguerite Humeau, Fani Parali and Cally Spooner.

She is currently a Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies (CTS), across the design school at London College of Communication, UAL and also a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice). She previously studied MA Design Interactions and also previously worked as a Research Fellow on the EPSRC-funded Citizen Naturewatch project at RCA. Additionally, she currently holds a postdoctoral researcher position on the Scoring Warnings project ay the Royal College of Art. Scoring Warnings, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, mobilises artistic practices to interrogate the instructional mode of address in disaster preparedness. It examines crossovers between emergency communication and contemporary art to explore more inclusive, engaging, and effective ways of communicating risk.Scoring Warnings is a collaboration between the Royal College of Art, University of the Arts London’s Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), University College London’s Warning Research Centre (WRC), the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR), Tate Modern, East Gallery, Arnolfini, Hangar Barcelona and more.