Teresa Dillon is an artist, researcher and Professor of City Futures at the School of Art and Design, UWE, Bristol.

Her performative, research and sound based work symbolically and critically examines the techno-civic systems, which affect and shape everyday life. Recent commissions include UNDER NEW MOONS WE STAND STRONG (2016) a sculptural installation composed of a large-scale model of a CCTV camera made from recycled cardboard, with accompanying bird spikes, text and images. Canary Songs (2016) a sound reenactment and choral performance for a 5.1 cinema space, which drew on historical sources and female workers accounts of a WW1 military shell filling factory.

Current work continues to focus on sound re-enactments of the built environment as well as sound, noise and infrastructural literacies within “smart” city governance, repair cultures and free-to-use Urban Huts.

Since 2007 she has curated various independent and established art programmes. Including festivals OFFLOAD, Systems for Survival (2007) and UM: Experiments with Media (2008-2010), the N.I.P (new interfaces for performance) network (2007-2010) and the exhibition YOU MIGHT BE A DOG (2014). In 2012, Teresa was the lead curator for HACK-THE-CITY, Science Gallery, Dublin where she also developed urban hack labs and courses on synthetic biology. Following on from HACK-THE-CITY she established Urban Knights a series of talks and workshops, which provokes and promotes practical approaches and viable alternatives to urban governance and city living. In 2016 she was invited to curate the #make stream at Transmediale, Berlin.

Her background as a social and educational psychologist strongly informs her work. Previous academic research has focused on music and sound in therapeutic and learning contexts with practical work focusing on co-designing new and emerging educational software at Futurelab (2003-2006) and at the BBC on the Participate project (2006-2009).

This background also informs her interest in approaches to machine learning, environmental sensing, ethical tech development and open hardware and software. Projects and artistic works in this vein have explored living with AI, digital prisons, community led Internet initiatives, building your own home servers and open data with an emphasis on hardware control and design methodologies in which the user can always opt out or modify the tool according to their needs. Her work on open data has lead to supporting policy papers and cross-industry conversations on the topic.

Teresa's work has been exhibited widely across Europe and reviewed in Nature Magazine, Wire and BBC online. Her publications appear in various online media, academic and artistic journals and books. A Humboldt Fellow between 2014-2016 at UdK and TU Berlin she carried out work on artistic processes to making the electromagnetic spectrum audible and it's relation to the "smart" city.

polarproduce.org

urbanknights.org

Full list of all publications: polarproduce.org/publications/