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Miguel Álvarez-Fernández,
young sound artist and sound designer (Madrid, 1979), defines
his background as a conventional one. Composition studies at the
San Lorenzo de El Escorial's Conservatory, composer in residence
at the Madrid "Residencia de Estudiantes" from 2002
to 2005, improvement courses in Germany at the Internationale
Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik of Darmstadt, at the Stockhausen Stiftung
of Kürten, and at the Elektronische Studio of the Technische
Universität of Berlin.
Apart from some activities related
only with electronic music – the score for "A Via Láctea"
by the Brazilian director Lina Chamie, presented during the 2007
Cannes Festival, and the music for the electroacoustic concert/performance
live at the Neues Kunstforum in Köln, his current work mixes
and hybridizes electronic and artistic media in a research devoted
to the connections between sound, art and physiology.
Works born from Álvarez-Fernández's
research use electronic media united with traditional instruments
and voice. He is writing a Ph.D. thesis in Musicology at the University
of Oviedo that studies the connections between voice and electro-acoustic
media. These theories are also the object of the DissoNoiSex project
(the trio Álvarez-Fernández, Kersten, Piascik),
where Álvarez-Fernández has developed interactive
installations such as Soundanism and Repressound.
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Soundanism (or Sonanismo , the Spanish
title), is an interactive sound installation created in
2006 along with the German programmer and sound artist
Stefan Kersten and the Polish designer Asia Piascik .
The work explores possible interactions between music,
breathing, masturbation and sexuality. The visitor is
part of a closed circuit, wearing a helmet and a mask
with a little microphone inside. He provokes the sounds
he perceives. The microphone captures the noises generated
by the breathing, which are then analysed, digitally transformed
in real time and transmitted through 14 micro-speakers
placed inside the helmet. |
At the same time, the collected information
about the respiration is compared with the characteristics
of thousands of possible sonorities, stored in a database
and connected in different ways with the idea of sexuality
(extracts from porn movies' soundtracks, rock guitar solos,
screams of different animals, repetitive industrial machineries…).
The sounds that most resemble the soundanist's respiration
are then triggered and transformed (in a voluntary or involuntary
way) through his breathing.
The work explores the idea of control in
an interactive system and lies on the border between public
and intimate event, between consciousness and dream. The
work evades the categorization as a single installation,
as a performance piece or as a musical instrument, but invites
for interaction, either by trying to control and dominate
the system, or simply by relaxing and just breathing.
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This example of creative work by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández
clarifies some of the themes questioned in his works. We talked
about them while chatting about the next Festival PING! 04 in
Mallorca , trying to reveal some of the mechanisms at the basis
of this research. We also talked about the connections between
sound and sexuality, the themes at the origin of this research.
<Starting from my education in composition
> underlines Álvarez-Fernández <I consider
music and sound in their cultural dimensions, keeping in mind
that the ability they have to generate emotion appears to us as
evident, as a matter-of-fact truth. To get to how I arrived to
link the idea of sound to sexuality, it is necessary to understand
these two aspects as part of the binomial that opposes body and
mind. Both music and sex are two cultural categories that can
strongly affect our bodies, so they have substantial resemblance>.
Miguel wrote an illuminating text on this argument,
"Del diálogo a la ilusión de control: Procesos
interactivos en la instalación sonora Sonanismo",
that starts examining Sonanismo and then investigates those aspects
through the notion of interactivity. The work is analyzed in all
its conceptual and material elements, describing in detail its
lay-out, and voluntarily omitting the particulars related to software
and technology, to emphasize the conceptual meaning of the installation.
Key themes at the base of the work
and of the artist's thoughts emerge with the evidence
of a perfectly written theory: the work poses some aesthetical
problems related to interactive processes. Sonanismo proposes
a critical reading of some typical hypothesis of the creative
environment that surrounds digital, electronic and media
art. Interactivity itself has now gained a stratification
of meanings, often connected with positive and creative
connotations, but it still should be the object of numerous
questions, sometimes ironical, that the work wants to
arouse. <What does interactive work mean?> says
the artist. <[…] Is there a sort of direct relation
between this term and the contemporaneousness or modernity
of the work? […] Can interactivity be considered
as an aesthetic value? […]. Inside the work, the
function of the subject, the soundanist, cannot be separated
from the object itself, the installation, in a way that
joins them together continuously, in a constant feedback
process>.
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In this sense, the idea of interactivity as a
dialogue is investigated through a process that shows all its
limits and sometimes its impossibilities. It is the breathing
of the subject itself that generates an answer from the object,
which is in this case another subject, or, better said, "the
other" that lies inside the uncontrollable respiration and
the unconscious of the person who is breathing and listening
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In this dialogical situation,
the soundanist accomplishes his involvement in the process
of activation of this mechanism becoming both producer and
consumer of the work. The consciousness of this duality
appears during the time-lag after which the sounds arrive
to the visitor, following a delay the authors used to make
less direct and immediate the impression of an answer and
therefore the control of the work. |
The dialogical component is thus
performed through a constant wait, a curiosity, a communicative
tension and through the attempts to dominate the mechanism of
the installation itself. This dichotomy is also present in our
relations with music and sex, as sharply points out again Álvarez-Fernández
: <At this point, it is difficult to make a distinction between
the anxiety to know and the anxiety to dominate. Soundanism does
not want to answer if the two verbs, to know and to dominate,
have the same meaning. Rather it wants to displace this question
to a creative area, and make it resound together with other questions
concerning our relationship with sex and with music. And obviously
this takes place in the more suitable location for all these problems,
the visitor's head>.
The constant contraposition inside
the installation between image/sound, public/private, outside/inside,
body/mind, material/immaterial, subject/object, conscious/unconscious,
human/animal, technology/biology, is itself part of an attempt
to refer to the other , both in terms of sexuality and music,
two areas where there is a possibility or a need to get access
to the other or to the alter ego which is inside everyone.
Interactivity is also, for
Miguel, a way to underline the political dimension of art,
in a cultural and social sense. He affirms that it is necessary
to be conscious of the fact that we decide to play the game
and that this is something we like. Interactivity is a way
to experience and share even the less evident aspects of
our society and culture and all our doubts about them.
The crucial point that Álvarez-Fernández
wants to enlighten is that sound and music, like sex, often
seem to be the result of spontaneous attitudes, but they
are actually products of different forms of education and
cultural practices. Every work proposes a platform that
allows for the implication of the visitor, so he can enjoy
experiences that try to represent the processes also found
at the core of different cultural, social and political
practices.
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This project tries to outline a
parallel cartography of the histories of music, sound and sexuality.
<The categories through which we think about music change through
time – says Álvarez Fernández –, and
because of this fact the very concept of music is -must be- equally
malleable, flexible, open […]>. He points out: <Our
sensorial apparatus is the result of a historical process that
goes on until the present and, in a broader sense, our notion
of human being is an idea oriented through historical and social
processes […]>.
Another important and interesting
aspect of Álvarez-Fernández's research is related
to the idea of voice as a primary interface – in its different
modulations, sounds, breaths, sighs, words, accents, pronunciations…
–, as the first medium through which we express ourselves
and represent the world. Voice (along with language, a cultural
system full of significations) is an emerging element of the installation
Repressound, which DissoNoiSex is now developing. Reality and
its representation compete with each other inside the installation
through sound and images. Fragments of black-and-white films are
projected on an extended screen on the surface of a room. The
furniture and the walls are painted in black and white, similarly
to those recorded in the movie, so the world in the screen is
amplified and enlarged in the real one.
The public, surrounded by those
fictitious elements, can navigate through the micro-stories presented
by the projections, short scenes of old movies that at the beginning
are stopped, darkened, or blurred. Only the sounds produced by
the visitors of the installation with their voices or bodies can
activate the cinematographic fragments. The pitch, the intensity
and the timbre of the sounds produced control the sequences, moving
them forwards or backwards, modifying their temporal structure,
rendering them visible, or altering their visual aspect.
Once again we find those contrapositions
that stimulate a dialogical relation between work and audience:
reality/fiction, time/space, image/sound, art/game…, reinforcing
and fading at the same time the distance between what we actually
live and what we could live.
Miguel Álvarez-Fernández
understands the research with new media as a way to explore realities
through collaborative projects, as open and shared as possible.
He is a professional amateur himself, with a taste for impure
forms of art and media while remaining committed to the most substantial
aspects of the piece, and thus reaching the nucleus of each idea
by preserving the conceptuality of the work from the risk of a
technical and technological redundancy.
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