Controls Unbound
electronic
2’
September 2025
music for visuals by Harriet Davey
Exhibitions
27/09/2025 to 14/11/2025 - esc medien kunst labor, Austria, OUT OF CONTROL Exhibition
Controls Unbound is an audiovisual work with visuals by Harriet Davey, and music and sound design by Imogen Davey, commissioned by esc medien kunst labor for the exhibition OUT OF CONTROL. The work follows Whowle, the virtual avatar and digital identity of Harriet Davey, as they are absorbed into the process and development cycle of a fictional game studio, their body scanned, rigged, and repurposed into a navigable game asset with exaggerated sexualised features and no agency over how they are controlled or perceived.
The film cuts between two visual languages: one of production fantasy, the other of gameplay reality. Viewers watch Whowle performing themselves - being scanned, recorded, animated, and then helplessly played. Controls Unbound follows the journey of a virtual star reckoning with the loss of their own bodily autonomy at the hands of the players’ choices.
The soundscape of Controls Unbound is structured around early console era nostalgia, glitches and audio artefacts, and sweeping drones. Sonic identities of the past are transfigured and mutated into broken, degraded fragments. Boundaries between digital sound and acoustic resonances are dissolved to form woven clouds of audio which create an intense sensory effect. The texture of the sound fuses that which is human in nature, with digital noise and corrupted remnants of forgotten audio.
