Homo Electromagneticus II: Paradigms and Paradoxes: An "After the Media" Musical Performance

Homo Electromagneticus is a musical performance realized in 2022 through a set of original instruments created with open-source and low-cost technologies. Arduino microcontrollers, sensors, brainwaves, MIDI, algorithms, and the interaction with plants’ capacitance provide digital, acoustic and mechatronic sound production forms. Cognizant of the material and energy dump that is the signature of the Anthropocene, the piece thrives on a commitment to the conscientious and responsible production of waste. Thus, in addition to original musical instruments, I also utilized old bottles, kitchen tools, electronics equipment taken from the dump, obsolete musical instruments, human gestures and brain waves as research and performance tools.    Homo Electromagneticus reacts to the exclusivity of digital sound production, choosing instead to revitalize and promote acoustic sound production. Thinking along with Zielinski (2010), the piece helps us to consider art “after the media,” meaning that it foregrounds the production of acoustic sound mediated through electromagnetic interfaces. The technological aspect of production is prevalent, but digital and electric sound production does not dominate the performance of the work as a whole. The performance relies on the emergence of a mix compositum in which the distinction between performer and composer becomes blurred. Each performance of the piece requires the players to generate sound anew. Additionally, the very definition of musical “instrument” undergoes a transformation since the performer becomes, in a sense, a necessary instrument in the production of the piece

7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through

This article explores the profound themes and conceptual framework of the performance installation, "7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through" which merges sounds, texts, images, and movement to engage the audience in an imaginative exploration of the unborn. The work delves into the realms of mortality, wandering souls, and regimes of invisibility. It delves into an unacknowledged past, embodying a ghostly memory that represents a forbidden, mutilated, and foreign existence.The project is framed within an anti-colonial context, emphasizing a choreography of the struggling body as it seeks escape from hazardous environments and transcends borders. It embraces the choreography of contamination, celebrating fugitivity and displacement as transformative actions. With a transdisciplinary approach, the work aims to materialize and give shape to nonhegemonic voices and existences. It encourages the exploration of impossible choreographies and envisions alternative cosmological futures that address social, gender, and racial inequalities. This pursuit of a radical aesthetic shift fosters collaborative efforts to challenge prevailing power structures.

CyberTouch: An interdisciplinary research on Dance, Music and Live Coding

“CyberTouch” is an experimental audiovisual performance which combines dance and music with live coding, and a prototyped wearable interactive technology to create audiovisual experiences. It is is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research informed by Cybernetics, a structured improvisation between two individuals a composer and a performer. Our goal is to explore and propose new relationships and strategies in performing practices and interactive audiovisual arts, while expanding the potential of the human body

Listening is Action: A Soundwalk with Hildegard Westerkamp

In the sound documentary Listening is Action, the composer Hildegard Westerkamp engages in a conversation with Luis Velasco-Pufleau at her home in the city of Vancouver, which is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She talks us through her first field recordings and her soundwalking practice, her work at the Vancouver Co-operative Radio, and her participation in the World Soundscape Project, all of which started or took place in the 1970s. Furthermore, she takes us on soundwalks at places she used to go and record more than thirty years ago, such as those now called Kitsilano Beach and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and that constitute the sources for her soundscape works A Walk Through the City (1981) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989). This sound documentary is an invitation to listen more attentively to the multiple voices that inhabit our environments in order to imagine new, plural, and unforeseen realities. The sound work Listening is Action is enhanced by a written commentary in which Luis Velasco-Pufleau explores the radical relationality of listening and the connection between Westerkamp’s thinking with the work of Pauline Oliveros and Hannah Arendt. Finally, he engages with critical listening positionality in order to reflect on some of the limits and contradictions present in the sound documentary

Midnight Reflections about our own Northern Ventriloquist\u27s Skills

“Midnight Reflections about our own Northern Ventriloquist\u27s Skills” is articulated in the form of a podcast in a conversational style scripted by longtime collaborators composer and performer. It starts by cartographing the authors’ previous collaborative works until they approach their last project ensemble, Campo Amniótico [CA] (2021), work in which the feedback or Larsen plays a paramount role, making the artwork highly unstable and elusive. As a result, performers and composer are in constant trouble, stripped of their cognitive performativity by the once enhancer technology, that in CA becomes almost a threat. That’s when the podcast starts to interact with recorded extracts of philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Achille Mbembe, and psychologist Thirusha Naidu on issues concerning posthumanism, postcolonialism and technological escalation. By applying and discussing their theories in the field of artistic research and, more specifically, in that of contemporary music, the authors will situate CA as a post-human artwork that aims to tip the balance more towards subversion than the status quo. That is following Eve Sedwick\u27s precept, when she said twenty years ago with some disillusionment that the result of a work is usually always the same: a little subversive, a little hegemonic

Assemblage and Non-Standard Aesthetics

Deleuze and Guattari describe the body without organs as a frontier experience, as an enrichment, strata, and an assemblage of intensities. The body without organs is made through experimentation, sound production, haptic perception rather than interpretation, and visual perception, because ideas of the world, the visual are encoded and appropriated by the conceptual apparatus, by the territorial machine. At the heart of Laruelle\u27s non-photography and his non-standard aesthetics is the attempt to withdraw onto-photo-logical causality from the visual, from object-forms. For this purpose, objects are to be considered as scientific discoveries and should be investigated using a generic science that uncovers indeterminants and scenarios. Therefore, this article discovers assemblages with the perspective of a non-standard aesthetic, to find not only in the audible material, but also in the visual material of video montages, double and multiple exposures, the non-onto-photo logical areas of perception of the organless, the imaginary, the darkening of concepts, the superpositions of experiences, and images without objects

Drifting: Integrating Embodied Practice and Making as a Compositional Process

This paper will introduce the creative process of the project Drifting (2022), a recent sound art performance piece of the Brushing Series. The process of this work involves an organic integration between the design/making of technological medium and embodied experimentation, which forms a constant feedback loop between the two of them. This will be discussed from the notion of affordance and embodied musical practices. Furthermore, this paper will suggest the integration between those two as a compositional approach that can be effective when utilizing technological medium and gestural expressions

Performing with Technology

This article departs from an intermedial theatre production and an acousmatic sound performance. In these productions the use of audio and video technology was central to mediate a manifold of perspectives on societal challenges concerning migration and xenophobia. The multi-channel radiophonic composition Karlskrona/Malmö (2017), revolved around the fictional murder of a left-wing activist. The performance was produced at the same time as several notable violent right-wing hate crimes took place in Sweden. Quite a few detention centres were set on fire in different places in Sweden, in Kärrtorp, a suburb of Stockholm, alt-right activists attacked a peaceful demonstration, and in Malmö, a well-known activist was beaten down by neo-Nazis. Our other example, Arrival Cities: Malmö (2013), was inspired by the book Arrival City (2010) by the Canadian journalist Doug Saunders which described the cities that have become ports for the people who have migrated. According to Saunders, these cities are places of loneliness and misery but at the same time dynamic focal points for the transformation of most of humanity from rural to urban citizens. The performance combined theatre with chamber- and electro-acoustic music and portrayed the migrant situation in Sweden a few years before the migrant wave hit Europe in 2015 and many countries closed their borders.

Exploring Sonic Worlds: The significance of ‘instrumentality’

This paper develops the idea of ‘instrumentality’ to explore how the use of diverse tools or instruments involved in new music have the potential to (re)frame our engagement with the world. It will be argued that the choice of instrumental tools and how they are used in performance can not only enrich creative processes and outcomes for the artist but can also alter the audience’s relationship to the world by encouraging a conceptual engagement with one or more of its aspects. We are specifically interested in exploring this potential when interdisciplinary or intermedial approaches are taken to develop and realise new musical works. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concepts of ‘revealing’ and ‘unconcealment’, and using contemporary work entitled Alluvial Gold as a case study, this paper interrogates the way in which new instrumental practices offer a renewed engagement with the world