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Ein Drama in Funkwellen


2024

Outsourcing

Sound installation with built-in speakers in ceiling lights on wheels
in collaboration with Samuel-Perea-Diaz
 as part of the Dystopia 2024 Biennale, organized by Errant Sound
2024



Outsourcing is a multichannel sound installation that reinterprets the dynamics of labour redistribution as sensible hierarchical structures between humans and machines. Starting in the 1980s, many English-speaking Western companies outsourced customer service jobs to former British colonies including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where labour costs are lower and regulatory frameworks more relaxed. Today, companies are taking advantage of information technology business process outsourcing (IT BPO) to replace human customer services and personal assistants with artificial intelligence. Delegation and agency enter into an ecology of labour and exploitation that becomes apparent in this installation.

A generative soundscape of AI-synthesized call centres and office environments is translated through machine-listening algorithms into light and sound impulses. Enclosures of obsolete neon ceiling lights function as resonant boxes that refer to the architectural and physical environments of overcrowded offices. The absence of neon bars is replaced by digitally controllable LEDs, enhancing the contradiction between obsolete materials and newer technologies. Headsets enable visitors to experience the sound environment and influence the outcome of the installation. Thus, by outsourcing the job of creating its composition to the public, the work is a critique of labour redistribution practices: the artists provide the means of production, while visitors can provide their labour to create value for the artists.





Noise Re(in)Duction

Sonic Intervention on the possibilities of noise reduction algorithms for Sound Art.
2024






NOISE RE(IN)DUCTION is an artistic research project that that explores the possibilities of noise reduction technologies as sonic material for music composition and sound art installations. The aim is to reappropriate noise reduction algorithms such as those found in videoconference applications and commercial headsets in order to question the prescriptive listening practices imposed by tech corporations.

Through a spectral analysis of field recordings from Berlin NOISE RE(IN)DUCTION addresses often overlooked listening practices that are involved in our everyday life, putting in question the algorithms’ inherent biases of race, gender, ability, and class. Sound sources of such as AC fans, radiators, home electronics, ambient noise, unwanted reverb and echo, wind, traffic, and conversations, are transformed into with clicks, pops, crackles, distortion, and other forms of digital “waste.” By deconstructing the different processes of sonic transformations, the project negotiates the boundaries of different understanding of what noise is and what is not.

NOISE RE(IN)DUCTION is particularly interested in mobile technologies that use noise reduction algorithms such as noise canceling headphones and mobile videoconference software. These technologies present and affront to the ways that we perceive and relate with our sonic surroundings, thus creating an implicitly sonic augmented reality that alienates further from unmediated sensible experiences.

The modification and combination of environmental sources, together with the physical isolation of headphones, provide an ideal situation to question the ways in which we perceive sound and noise mediated by audio technology and musical aesthetics. When noise becomes an aesthetic criterion for music, what is left to be reduced or cancelled?

In a world of hyper-mediation and overconsumption which induces a “Mental State of Noise,” paying close attention to noise sources and refocusing our listening habits provides a new perspective on noise and media oversaturation facilitated by tech corporations.

Modulo für die Bolivarische Republik des Klangs (2023)

Sound installation and intervention for a multichannel sound installation

CASH. Errant Sound, Berlin 1-12.09.2023
https://errantsound.net/2023/08/cash-group-exhibition-performances/



Modulo für die Bolivarische Republik des Klangs is a multichannel sound sculpture that reflects on the relationships of international exchange using devaluated currency as sonic material. Venezuelan Bolivares are used as modules for origami sculptures that amplify, filter, or transform the different news reports and political positions that circulated media during the height of the Venezuelan crisis (2018-2022) The piece conflates the official texts of EU sanctions against Venezuela with the discourses of the Venezuelan government and interviews with Venezuelan immigrants in Bogotá.

The installation re-signifies the origami sculptures into the immateriality of sound, providing an additional layer to the transductions of money as a cultural signifier. As an immigrant in a new land myself, I appropriate the struggles of Venezuelan migrants and present them in my own perspective as a Colombian mi

grant in Germany. By adding the sonic component, the origami pieces acquire a function as amplifiers, transducers and filters of information, of realities and relationships between global north and global south. In this case, cash (the paper currency) becomes, not a medium to add further value to my work, but rather signifier or a bigger struggle between the systemic injustices of immigration policies, of the post-colonial dynamics, and ultimately the materiality of money as a social construct.



Brain in the Shell

for Brain Computer Interfaces, 4D sound System and 3 to 6 performers

Opening of the Syndicate of Space and Sound.
Budapest, Hungary
2023







Brain in the Shell is performance that explores the possibilities of consumer-level devices to create a musical experience. Beyond the sonification of brain frequency bands and the translation of data into “mental states,” the piece explores the performativity of wearing BCI devices as an act of intrusion and violence. The device’sincompatibility and the practical constrains of closed consumer-level are made evident in the unexpectedsonic glitches that it generates. The piece creates dissonant soundscapes and eroding sonic decompositions through the use of the electrode’s raw data in order to provide a more sensorial and physical translation of brain data. The conceptual boundaries between human and non-human agencies are challenged, as we embrace the possibilities of utopic places generated through the collaboration of humans and machines.

The first presentation of this performance took place on May 2023 at the Syndicate of Sound and Space (SSS) in Budapest using 4DSOUND technology. This is the development of a three-year long research on brainwave sonification, which has resulted in papers, conference talks and performances.