**AO Roberts** (they/them) is a crip media conjuror, sculptural scenographer, and sonic interventionist who builds spaces resonating with loss and the unruly poetics of Disabled life. Based in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg), with settler ancestry (Scottish, English, Norwegian, French), their work unfolds across sculptural installation, experimental sound, and digital ecosystems—dwelling in the noisy instabilities of sensation and utterance.  

 

Their installations are spells cast in collaboration—detuning labor and vibrating at the pitch of what bodies know but cannot prove. As critic Hannah Doucet observes, Roberts forges "unexpected and poetic connections between property, protection, body, care, and control," crafting spaces where sound and matter shed their roles as mere messengers to become thresholds of possibility and contradiction.

 

In Liturgies for Chiron (2022), a performance created with Anju Singh, Roberts transformed the installation Zero Input Enclosure Movement into what Leah Sandals called "a resonant archive of generational labour trauma," weaving sonic amulets and fragile architectures of communion. 2019’s Crisis Canon staged "lamentation as method," (C Magazine) flooding an abandoned concrete site with the reverberations of collective grief performed by Sarah Jo Kirsch, Doreen Girard, Zohreh Gervais, and Bret Parenteau.

 

Their 2024 release Plants Properties Equipment (PPE)—an interactive world developed with Séance Collective—invites players into what GUTS magazine termed "a sentient landscape where healing and erasure coexist." Featuring an original soundtrack with contributions from Johanna Hedva, Molly Joyce, Andy Slater, Medical Museum and Chisato Minamimura, the project creates a space that, as noted in The Capilano Review, "refuses resolution, instead dwelling in the generative fractures of crip time." 

 

Roberts’ work has been recognized through a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship, inclusion on the 2021 Sobey Art Award Longlist, and residencies at Dreamsong Gallery and Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation. Under the alias VOR, they compose and perform experimental electronics, including their 2022 full-length release Ruminant (Makade Star). In Fall 2025, they begin a PhD in Communications and Culture at York/Toronto Metropolitan University, where they will deepen their study of disability, sound, and the haunted infrastructures of digital space.  

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