Sweætshops® (alternatively stylised as swextshops) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and multi-instrumentalist blurring the lines between live-art, sound, public disruption, AI, film and audience participation. Their moniker a portmanteau of sweatshops and sweetshops represents the contradictory stranglehold (exploitation and gratification) of the global economic lottery. Under the guise of an impersonal corporate entity their works are presented as esoteric products, creating intense absurdist allegories about the nameless social undercurrents of the 21st century from the waste of consumerism and pop culture.
About the residency:
witchtrialversion3 was the third iteration of a series of location specific sound-performances, commissioned for Hidden Door Festival 2022. The ongoing witchtrialversion project looks at our unwitting interaction with algorithms and artificial intelligence as a present-to-future manifestation of the duplicitous Sídhe and Færyland (Otherworld) of Scottish folk-belief. Viewing the witch burnings as unconscious mass human sacrifice events to usher in the spirits of the printing press and industrialisation. For the performance we processed the 374 names of those accused of witchcraft in the Edinburgh county over the 3-day run at the festival. With each of the accused assigned a labelled yarrow stalk (or "devil's plaything" used as oracles in British folk magic and I-Ching) in a ritualistic process of factory divination. Subsequently creating 3 brooms out of the aforementioned "wands" to be incinerated as sacrificial waste disposal at a later date. The improvised sound for the performance was created from the electromagnetic frequencies of a running conveyor belt, live and automated bagpipe drones and manipulated traditional music recordings.
