aly,willamina cutler-gear
aly,willamina cutler-gear and The Shetland Norn Automaton began doing duets together in 2025.
aly,willamina cutler-gear is an artist based in Glasgow. she was born in Foula, Shetland and is descended from the last speakers of Foula Norn (d. 1913). she lived in the USA noise houses Cold Spring Hollow and The Firehouse from 2016-18 and 2019-22.
The Shetland Norn Automaton is a homemade software system for choreographing 632,082 words distributed across 335 keyword-in-context-based Shetland Norn
datasets drawn from Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, a salvage philology project for which aly,willamina’s Foula
ancestors and their community members were some of the main interview subjects between 1893 and 1897. The Shetland Norn Automaton is not a translation
project or a language revival project, it is a machine for reanimating dormant Shetland Norn lifeworlds via statistically informed re-utterances of lexical neighbours her dead relatives and their community members spoke while her Norn language was going dormant. keywords include: dance, dash, day, dead, dew, dirt, dishevel, dog, dough, drift, drink, drizzle, dry, dyke, eagle, east, eat, eddy, eel, egg, end, ewe-yowe, eye, face, fall, fasten, fat, feel, fence, festival, find, finger, fish, fishermen,
fishing, flag, flesh, flock, flood, floor, fly.
datasets drawn from Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, a salvage philology project for which aly,willamina’s Foula
ancestors and their community members were some of the main interview subjects between 1893 and 1897. The Shetland Norn Automaton is not a translation
project or a language revival project, it is a machine for reanimating dormant Shetland Norn lifeworlds via statistically informed re-utterances of lexical neighbours her dead relatives and their community members spoke while her Norn language was going dormant. keywords include: dance, dash, day, dead, dew, dirt, dishevel, dog, dough, drift, drink, drizzle, dry, dyke, eagle, east, eat, eddy, eel, egg, end, ewe-yowe, eye, face, fall, fasten, fat, feel, fence, festival, find, finger, fish, fishermen,
fishing, flag, flesh, flock, flood, floor, fly.
aly,willamina cutler-gear has previously shared solo and collaborative work in contexts such as International Noise Conference (Miami, 2020), Market Gallery
(Glasgow, 2024), Movement Research at Judson Dance Church (NYC, 2019), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow, 2026), Goldsmiths (London, 2026), HGB (Leipzig,
2024), Sonorium (Boston, 2022), Essex University (Colchester, 2025), The String (Shetland, 2018), Wave Farm (New York, 2026), Dorchester Art Project (Boston,
2017), Bard College (New York, 2022) and Feeding Tube Records (Massachusetts, 2018).
(Glasgow, 2024), Movement Research at Judson Dance Church (NYC, 2019), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow, 2026), Goldsmiths (London, 2026), HGB (Leipzig,
2024), Sonorium (Boston, 2022), Essex University (Colchester, 2025), The String (Shetland, 2018), Wave Farm (New York, 2026), Dorchester Art Project (Boston,
2017), Bard College (New York, 2022) and Feeding Tube Records (Massachusetts, 2018).
she built a new version of the Shetland Norn Automaton at Hospitalfield in Arbroath in June 2026. the new Shetland Norn Automaton consists of: water, salt, and earth based soft-hardware, a locally hosted csm-1b clone of herself, and a Python and SuperCollider based 7-window grain-latching synthesis environment that uses NLP as armature and 290 parameter presets as score. Together, they improvise.
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Classifieds
“Classifieds is the solo project of Glasgow based Nikki Lynch. Using field recordings, cassettes, electronics and ambient drones, she layers ephemeral & dissonant sounds – resulting in fairly deranged, sometimes harsh, spectral amalgamations”
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Jon Ramsay
Avant-pastiche for laughter, sobs, rapture and disorientation. Charles Ives meets Gorguts.
