Through A Series of Gaps Rather Than a Presence, artist and sound researcher Pedro Oliveira offers an artistic, decolonising framework for investigating what he calls the “colonial politics of sonic biometrics.” Oliveira examines acts of collecting, ranking, taxonomizing, and normalizing vocal traits and their subsequent weaponization in the border-industrial complex. Through vocal performances using content from voice recognition and accent recognition databases, Oliveira builds a new form of anti-archive sonic insolence. 

A Series of Gaps Rather Than a Presence was co-commissioned by CTM and Deutschlandfunk Kultur Radio Art / Klangkunst; vocalists Enana, Mariana Bahia, and /Lio.DIC/. accompanied Oliveira.