Concierto: 23rd JEU DE TEMPS / TIMES PLAY, IN COLLABORATION WITH CMMAS [CANADÁ - LATINOAMÉRICA]
"Canada
Véro Marengère
Steven Webb
Latin America
Alejandro Brianza
Juan Cáceres Avitia
Guillermo Eisner Sagüés
Oscar Andres Chaves Morales"
23 jun 2023
"-Steven webb -- iSAD v.1.0 (2021 /13:51) [Videomusic]
iSAD or “Internet Separation Anxiety Disorder” is a term used online to describe the anxious feelings associated with being separated from the digital world for an extended period. During the pandemic, this digital separation manifested with real consequences, as any loss of signal led to a loss of communication with other humans entirely. Exploring online forums during the first Covid lockdowns of March-December 2020 led me to encounter other peoples' stories of their battles with loneliness, and highlighted to me the importance of digital spaces in contemporary social life. Intersecting with these spaces are AI Bots, which are becoming an increasingly frequent part of moderating online communities. I posed questions to the AI GPT-3, asking it about happiness, predictions for the future and how it felt to be separated from humans. Compiling these answers, I interspersed them with the sounds of 1990s Apple Macintosh computers and a poem by Victoria Liao.
¡Sad — a friend
Or a closet face
at home to mend
and clothed to send
to caustic space?
Is ad a friend,
or made to end?
A cause to pace
home to amend
that sad’s a face,
lost to a rend.
I sat a friend
at home to mend.
—Victoria Liao
-Oscar Andres Chaves Moreales -- The Garden on the other side of the fence (2021 /8:28)
The Garden on the Other Side of the Fence is born of a listening score for an electroacoustic mixed work with tape, accordion and guacharaca, and meant to be played live. The graphic possibilities afforded by representing sound parameters as spectral visualization provide the tools to go further with some additional emotional understanding: colours, proportions and thresholds not only quantify but can express as well. This work seeks to articulate a bothersome situation in my life in the rainy Colombian countryside: to live next to a large flower-growing company that exports its harvest for sale to countries in the Northern Hemisphere during the winter.
-Alejandro Brianza -- kowloon (2022 / 5:51)
Located in Hong Kong and also known as “the city of darkness”, Kowloon was the most densely populated settlement in history. And although its inhabitants maintained an organization based on a harmonious state of anarchy, certain problems related to gangs, drugs and other illegalities led to Kowloon’s demolition in 1994. The memory of Kowloon today is a cyberpunk postcard, swinging between tranquility and chaos.
-Juan Cácares Aviti -- Entendre la Sensation (2021 / 6:42)
What matters here is the double meaning of the French verb “entendre”: to listen and to hear, but also, to understand.
- Guillermo Eisner sangüés -- Esculturas temporales (2022 / 7:53)
Esculturas temporales is arranged as a continuum of sound fragments that seeks to construct diverse ways of sculpting time, diverse gestures, diverse paths of accumulation and distension of energies. Composed exclusively from double bass samples, the work takes sound as a malleable material and proposes to sculpt on it as if we could grasp it, take it, feel it with our hands. In short, it is a vain attempt to make tangible an ephemeral material such as sound, of which we can only verify the temporal and spatial experience that its fleeting presence leaves us with.
-Véro Marengère -- Hyra (2022 / 6:00) [Videomsic]
Hydra is a 3D video artwork made with photogrammetry, scanning, 3D modeling and animation. The sounds are made exclusively from granular synthesis and voice synthesis via SuperCollider. The work evokes the quiet strength of plant beings. From being nearly totally paralyzed in a “natural” environment to being fully mobile and vibrant in an “artificial” environment, the plant no longer resembles a plant, but rather more an algae or mineral being. The work questions our tendency to oppose the natural of the unnatural. In this meditative and benevolent 3D alterworld, plants explore the ambiguity of their own identity."