Cold Read, Andrea Roberts

Knot Project Space, with support from Arts Court Theatre, present a special participatory workshop and related performance by Winnipeg-based artist Andrea Roberts, who performs under the name VOR. Situated within an emptied-out wood-paneled Courtroom in the Arts Court, Andrea Roberts led a session using vocal modulation, audio forensics, legal transcripts, and one’s own digital footprints to generate, perform and/or transmit text and sound works. This workshop was presented as part short series of events and workshops that were coordinated by Knot Project Space in the Courtroom from December 10-12, each reflecting in some way on the gravities and world-making potentials of individual and collective speech within a site so tethered to the languages, processes and force of law.

Cold Read

Cold Read is a term used in acting to describe the performance of a script with no rehearsal; psychics do cold readings too, by generalizing the physical and emotional presentation of their targets. Online, our scrolling and clicking feed big data a new kind of cold read, plotting a skewed diagram of the self. This call to perform the self through choice within techno-capitalism is increasingly tied up with definitions of the voice as a legal, bio-metrically distinct expression of the individual. How can we use sound and language to intervene on and subvert these logics?

Andrea Oliver Roberts

Andrea Oliver Roberts is a Winnipeg based multidisciplinary artist known for their sculptural installations and performance works that use sound, video and print to contend with technology, identity, and systems of belief within capitalism. Roberts has shown at galleries and performed at festivals internationally with recent presentations including Send + Receive 2019, Plug In ICA Stages Biennial, Montreal Film Pop, Truck Gallery, SomArts San Francisco, and The Auxiliary, UK. Roberts has performed as VOR, their solo as experimental sound project, since 2015. Roberts writing on the voice, gender and technology has been featured on SoundingOut! and they were a recent artist in residence at Oolite Arts, Miami and Brooklyn’s Pioneerworks Center for Art and Innovation.

Related Programming


Workshop: Second Tongues, Serena Lee. Courtroom, Arts Court. Nov. 23, 2019.


Performance: Kempelen’s Breath, VOR. Courtroom, Arts Court. Dec. 10, 2019.


Residency: Expanded Practice, Shani K Parsons. Knot Project Space. Dec. 2-14, 2019.


Performance: Documents, Autumn Knight. Courtroom, Arts Court. Dec. 12, 2019.