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Page 1: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Ar tu ro Mo y a V i l l é nSound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music

http://arturomoyavillen.com/

Page 2: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Violence in Saying II (Framework) p. 3

Monster Game p. 7

Speaking is not seeing p. 10

Just Talk o Talk Alone p. 13

Coming to Blows p. 16

Violence in Saying I p. 19

CUT p. 23

Wait p. 27

Deny the Given Voice p. 30

Specio p. 34

Shut-Your-Mouth Machine p. 39

Bio p. 42

Index

Page 3: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Note:

Violence in Saying II constitutes an artistic framework where the following projects are contained:

- Monster Game

- Speaking is not seeing (Hablar no es ver)

- Just Talk or Talk Alone (Solo habla)

- Coming to Blows (Llegar a las manos)

The project was supported ub 2019 by Comunidad de Madrid Visual Arts Grants

Violence in Saying IIFramework

...everybody to some extent try to acquire and resist

a reason, defend themselves and accuse..

Aristóteles. Rhetoric. Chapter 4, Book I

I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration

of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out

any irregularities my speech might have.

Alvin Lucier. Extract from

I’m sitting on a room

Page 4: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

structures speech, understood as a shift in the

use of language that takes us out of our lone

secure selves and towards meeting the other;

an inscrutable and infinitely strange other with

whom we are nevertheless placed in a familiar

and contiguous context.

Speech as a basic act of communication whe-

re points of view are cast or shared in a public

space —that which is rhetorical— or a private

one —that which is dialectal—, an act where ar-

guments are used to support one’s own ideas

and wear away those of others.

Hence, it is a voiced, an embodied, an ethical

form of saying, face to face in the presence of

an “other”, as proposed by Levinas3. But also a

distant, an amoral and anonymous form of sa-

ying characteristic of the media; bodiless voices

inviting the normalisation and exacerbation

3 Emmanuel Levinas “De otro modo que ser o más alla de la esencia” Sígueme, 2003

“All speech is violence, a violence all the more

formidable for being secret”.1 These words, from

Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, quite ac-

curately convey the proposition underlying the

project hereby presented.

Speech is not where violence is invoked, as

traditionally positted by philosophy, but a place

where violence hides in order to silently assem-

ble the blows and kicks of dialog.

Similarly to how substitute violence in ritual sacri-

fice operates2, spoken words embody a different

kind of violence that is other and prior, which is

impossible to dispel and thus becomes redirected

towards the safety of language, where whoever

speaks avoids suffering unacceptable damage.

The project is conceived as a space to think

about the ways in which violence inhabits and

1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 20082 Concept by por René Girard en “La violen-cia y lo sagrado” Anagrama, 1983

Violence in Saying IIFramework

Page 5: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

understanding, another layer of communication;

a genuine glitch of expression that finds its origin

in the body and being-in-the-world, as in being-

towards-the-other. This project proposes the

meaning and utility of an aesthetic-philosophical

vision in dealing with matters pertaining to the

field of medicine.

With contributions from professional artists, en-

gineers, linguists, philosophers, speech thera-

pists, psychologists, and nonverbal communi-

cation analysis specialists, this project reaches

beyond the limits of traditional exhibitions and

poses itself as a multidisciplinary observation

point with an aesthetic epicentre, enabling the

detection, demonstration, and reading of the

violent breeding ground that supports speech;

a space to ponder over how violence enables

what are seemingly its opposites: discourse and

dialog.

of violence. This project also faces aesthetics’

own ways of saying, accepting the specific di-

fficulties of its relationship with a manifold and

anonymous receiver, and highlighting its model

of deferred suppression.

As with Violencias del decir I1, a considerable part

of the current project concerns various speech

impairments and voice disorders, such as dys-

phemia (i.e. stuttering). From our perspective,

dysphemia is the point where violence reaches a

speaker’s voice and is shaped into sound. This

disorder could be explained, philosophically, as

originating from our awareness of a war taking

place in the background between the self and

the other. Aesthetically, stuttering should there-

fore not be considered a disorder, but an unfol-

ding of discourse which enables hearing, without

1 A site-specific sound installation that propo-sed the recorded voice of people with dysphemia who spoke about their voice. The voices were only intelligible by sticking the ear to the surfaces of the building intervened.

Violence in Saying IIFramework

Page 6: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Such a space is not meant for judgement; that

task concerns other initiatives and institutions,

and is to be applied to other unbearable vio-

lence. Instead, it simply intends to unmute and

bring closer to our senses certain invisible, and

thus formidable, instances of violence in speech.

We do not intend to eliminate the violence in

speech, for we are unsure whether in doing so

we would be shaking the very foundations of

communication.

The project is articulated through various initiati-

ves and proposals, including interactive installa-

tions, sound installations or anti-performances.

In a later stage a publication will be edited with

the essays and results of the artistic research

carried out. Violencias del decir is a milestone

within a framework for aesthetic investigation

developed over several years, dealing with the

inherent violence in listening, speaking, and

Violence in Saying IIFramework

other agents that enable what we think of as

communication. Communication understood as

a transdisciplinary happening, in which aesthe-

tics is accepted as a convergence and crossing

space amongst various lines of research.

Page 7: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Monster Game

Interactive Sound Installation(Comunidad de Madrid Visual Arts Grants)

Page 8: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Some concerns with stuttering as a form of violence

on speech itself were explored on the author’s pre-

vious project, Violencias del decir I. The current pro-

ject again deals with stuttering, but this time violence

takes on the form of a voice – that of the author of

the experiments –, attempting to induce stuttering in

other voices, just to prove a hypothesis. We believe

these experiments show some unbearable forms of

oppression which quietly inhabit our culture; the the-

sis is made possible by an underlying reasoning that

endorses and allows such research but disregards

the harm endured by its subjects. Tudor’s thesis re-

presents a model of thought which reflects Levinas’

diagnosis: “essence is the extreme synchronism of

war”, or in other words, recurrent themes in philoso-

phy – the being, essence, time, etc– disregard the

‘other’, and such disregard can only breed war. The

study accurately exemplifies this model of thought

where the ‘other’ is simply something to be con-

trolled. Levinas’ ethical spin on essence towards

Twenty-two balls are scattered around the room.

Each ball houses a loudspeaker inside, connected

to an electronic device able to detect movement.

Kicking them triggers an audio recording, diffused

around the space like the moving ball itself. When

the ball stops, the audio stops.

The audio files consist of recorded readings of

fragments of Mary Tudor’s 1939 thesis An Experi-

mental Study of the Effect of Evaluative Labelling of

Speech Fluency. This thesis became known later

as ‘Monster Study’, for its lack of ethical conside-

ration when inducing, in some cases lifelong, stu-

ttering in fluent-speaking children. The subjects of

her study were orphans from the Orphan Soldiers

and Sailors Home in Davenport, Iowa. The parts of

the thesis used in this piece correspond to trans-

criptions of interviews that Tudor herself had with

the 22 girls and boys subjected to the experiment.

22 balls, one per child.

the ‘other’ would have prevented Mary Tudor’s re-

search. The installation presents a playful, but sti-

ll critical, approach to these questions. The reified

one-to-one relationship between children and balls

– which are one of the World’s most wide-spread

playing objects – suggests a characteristic kind of

violence in art: substitution and the use of metaphor.

Visitors become accomplices of the violence in every

word awakened by the balls’ movement around the

exhibition space through their cooperation, as vo-

luntary as it is necessary for a revision of the violence

exerted during the experiments. The piece receives

an extra layer of violence through the kicking action,

establishing a violent relationship between artwork

and visitor, since the artwork can only exist when

the balls are kicked.

Because the balls used look like traditional football

balls, kicks also link the piece to mainstream sports,

particularly football (or soccer), clearly recipients of

deflected violence.

Page 9: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

On the other hand, the playful character of the piece

is ambivalent: whilst it offers a straightforward and fun

approach to the realization of the piece, it also opens up

a not so comforting dimension. The original study was

conducted by ‘playing’ with children’s lives, similar to

how visitors will play with the balls. Playfulness is used

then as a mechanism to decrease severity, to lessen the

weight. Except here, what is thinned out is the other’s

significance, it is the other’s presence that is blurred.

Page 10: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

Speaking is not seeing Interactive Sound Sculpture(Comunidad de Madrid Visual Arts Grants)

Page 11: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

A series of flexible silver polystyrene mirrors, with

a size of 200 x 50 cm, hang from a wall, equally

spaced, like a gallery of distorting mirrors found in

some fairgrounds. A solenoid is attached at the

back of each mirror and makes it vibrate. A micro-

phone on the top part of each mirror picks up the

voice of whoever stands in front. The sound of the

voice is sent to a Pure Data patch to process it and

send it to its corresponding solenoid, which trans-

forms the signal into various mechanical vibrations

that finally move the mirror’s surface.

Mirrors allow the deeply strange experience of

being able to see ourselves from outside our bo-

dies, a situation in which we can briefly glimpse the

other’s gaze, paradoxically, in our very own.

Thus mirrors are the first ‘other’. We talk to them,

with that ‘other’, trying to persuade; we unfold be-

fore them, trying to ascertain how authentic others

find our discourse. However, mirrors do not return

any sound, but a voiceless ventriloquy to which we

assign sound. But obviously, it is the space around

us that reflects our voice as multiple delayed wa-

vefronts, and it is our perceptual inclination to auto-

matically match the source of this reflected sound

to the mouth in the mirror, attempting the recons-

truction of an impossible fiction: unity between

image and sound. That is what we do when wat-

ching a film, transferring the origin of the sounds

we hear from the loudspeakers in the room to the

images moving on screen.

This piece, then, materializes the interference of

voice with image, and brings the violence in speech

onto mirrors’ surfaces, endangering its own pro-

cess of creation: speech makes the mirrors vibrate

and takes away our image in doing so. It attacks

its own fictional condition and, in its current state

of medial devaluation, echoes the breakup of its

compactness.

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Just Talk /Talk AlonePerformance/dialog and data analysis(Comunidad de Madrid Visual Arts Grants)

Page 14: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

other person’s face. After a silence, the process

restarts and the participants are able to see each

other again.

The appearance, disappearance, and replacement

of faces is achieved through changes to the ligh-

ting. Lightbulbs at each side of the booth receive

data from the microphones on either side. Audio is

transcribed and analysed by a custom multi-sof-

tware application, and its output drives dimmers to

change the lightbulbs’ intensities, in turn physically

manipulating the images on the perspex.

The resulting output also steers the movement of

the robotic arms in Llegar a las manos (Coming

to blows).

Solo Habla is a space established for a speech that

is just speech, speaking inevitably by itself, solilo-

quy; it is the emptying or opposite of a plural kind

of speaking, a shared weight in the sense propo-

sed by Blanchot, but also Levinas’ ethical form of

A booth, big enough for two people to sit, takes

up a prominent place in the exhibition space. The

booth situates the couple face-to-face through

separate entrances, separated by a transparent

perspex sheet. Each side of the booth has a mi-

crophone. “JUST TALK” read the LED signs over

each entrance, inviting participants to speak. The

seats, of adjustable height, enable the participants

to match their eyes to a mark on the perspex

sheet. Continuous speech by a participant causes

the image of the other across the perspex to vani-

sh, instead mirroring their own image. The eye-hei-

ght adjustment matching the mark on the perspex

allows this replacement to happen exactly over the

saying, in which the other, made present through

their face, represents the only significant thing .

Nonetheless, here one’s own speech directly re-

sults in the vanishing of the other, and the booth,

which may seem a neutral element, is actually a

censorship device, a repressive machine that adds

its own violent load. Despite being partly devoted

to data collection and analysis, the booth still is an

artistic device that approaches reality by savaging

it. The enclosure not only hides, separates and

isolates participants from the outside acoustically

and visually, but also reacts before them, interfe-

ring and conditioning their conversation. The piece

denies nothing, but instead fully accepts its partici-

pation in constructing art’s own violence of saying.

The device converts turns to speak into a battle

to impose one’s own image, which brings speech

closer to a solitary act in which the other’s presen-

ce becomes instrumental.

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Booth: inner view

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Coming to Blows Interactive Robotics(Comunidad de Madrid Visual Arts Grants)

Page 17: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

not aim to morph one reality into another but ins-

tead aims to limit, force and extract aspects from

speech and display them in a different medium,

which means the project itself assists and parti-

cipates in the violence it intends to reflect upon.

Thus a voice becomes a hand, and the attempts

of language at describing, grasping and there-

fore delimiting the world, change target when a

robotic hand attempts to do the same on lan-

guage itself.

Data coming from the conversations taking pla-

ce in Solo Habla (see above) are picked up by

The piece tries to return violence to speech, in

this case through the robot as a mediating de-

vice. Robots embody the desire to subdue that

which espapes one’s control –from nature to the

“other”–, and the promise to free society from

servitude. Such dual aspect is a defining charac-

teristic of technological breakthrough, and cons-

titutes much of the foundations of Media Art.

The title of the piece refers to a colloquial ex-

pression which contends that language is unable

to hold the violence it is intended to dispel, and

conflict between two speakers leads to physi-

cal violence. Converting speech into robotic arm

movement has not been considered as an issue

of translation or mapping, since the project does

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a device driving four robotic arms. The robots move their

various joints and fingers in response to the analysed data

from participants’ speech. These movements range from

universally recognisable gestures – such as pointing, gree-

ting, thumbs-up (agreement), thumbs-down (disagreement),

etc – to slamming the platform that they are placed upon.

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Violence in Saying ISite-specific Sound Installation

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Interactive Site -specific Sound installation for

“Casa de la Cultura José Saramago”

The installation transforms the building into a soun-

ding and speaking living organism. The sounds

are hidden in the structure of the building and are

audible when visitors put their ear against any of

the metal or glass surfaces inside and outside the

facade. The installation uses 20 vibration speakers

and contains approximately 10 hours of sound.

The proposal puts the skin of the viewer in contact

with the skin of the building, encouraging an alter-

native relationship with architecture: gazing, which

needs distance, is replaced by a kind of listening

only possible through contact. The Saramago thus

becomes a public building accessible through inti-

mate principles and attitudes, such as scrutinising

someone’s privacy by eavesdropping through a

wall. The «voice» of the building is awakened by

sine waves that make metal and glass vibrate at

frequencies between 50 and 200 Hz, bringing its

oscillatory qualities to the foreground. Said archi-

tectural «voice» is put in conversation with voices

of recorded people, who speak about their own

voice. The voices belong to people who suffer from

dysphemia (stuttering), thus linking their difficulties

to communicate with the ways in which cultural

institutions reach citizens, inviting to reflect upon

art’s own modes of expression. Saramago’s voice

stutters not only as a way to embody and reflect

on our culture’s violent aspects of speaking, but

also to help normalise the voices of a collective for

whom speech and violence go hand in hand. The

installation has been created expressly for “Casa

de la Cultura José Saramago” and commissioned

by the Society of Philosophy of Castilla-La Man-

cha.

http://arturomoyavillen.com/violencias-del-decir-i

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Loudspeaker design placing

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CUTInteractive Sound Installation

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CUT reflects on cutting as a central dispositif of

our culture, particularly regarding listening and na-

rration. To listen is to create a cut above myself, for

allowing “the other” to exist; and it is also cutting

“the other” so that he becomes understandable to

my way of thinking. Hence, the cut is the mecha-

nism used by people to communicate; CUT opens

a fissure where sound and space, narration and

identity exchange processes and meanings.

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A low sinusoid (determined by the room’s dimen-

sions) is projected into the room, creating a stan-

ding wave with zones of high sound density and

silences (antinodes and nodes). Steel knives are

suspended from the ceiling exactly at these silence

points. These knives reveal sounds whenever they

are touched. Sounds are recordings from people

telling stories about their lives. These narrations are

randomly cut, progressively becoming a hindran-

ce for listening: the longer they are in contact with

the knife, the bigger the obstacle. As the listener’s

interest increases, so does the speed of cutting.

The user constructs the cut, but can’t control the

randomness of the narrations.

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WaitSite-specific Sound Installation

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time appears as the colliding of a present devoid of

content –the act of perception– and a future that,

responsible for providing meaning, remains always

out of reach. The work is always there, constant-

ly present, and yet it remains permanently out of

reach.

The work was shown in four 400-watt speakers,

amongst which ten half-hour loop sound tracks

were spatialized.

The four speakers were placed in line on one of

the covered passages of the Gothic cloister, speci-

fically in the one corresponding to the entrance to

the cultural centre. The loudspeakers were placed

at the center of each one of the passage’s four ar-

ches, with the cones pointing inwards, and posi-

tioned in the boundary between the indoor space

and the outside.

The placement of the loudspeakers allowed me

to open a game in which to highlight the double

Wait is a site-specific sound installation for the Go-

thic cloister of Center del Carmen that explores

time and perception as collaborating agents in the

constitution of the aesthetic experience.

An infinite raining sound, containing an invitation to

wait, splits the subject between the aesthetic en-

joyment of the present and the promise of a future

novelty/difference. This vast and uncertain waiting

dimension of the cloister, understood as an articu-

lation between an interior space and another ex-

terior. The sounds of the work, coming from rains

recorded both indoors and outdoors, also connec-

ted, from the internal space of the work, with that

double nature of the cloister.

The invitation to wait contained in the work acts as

a disruption in the movement of visitors, questio-

ning the nature and necessity of these movements.

From this perspective, the work also assumed the

structural ambiguity of the cloister, thought at the

same time as a form of communication between

the different dependencies of the monastery, and

as an infinite and closed walk, capable of favoring

contemplative states. In this sense, the installation

tried to deepen this contradiction and sought to

convert the group of the cloister, as a passage

architecture, as a non-place, in the place par ex-

cellence of the aesthetic experience, in the place

where movement takes party in the suspension /

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Deny the Given VoiceInteractive Sound Installation

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current meaning from the ensuing silence, whe-

ther unexpected or intentional; on the other hand,

these are speeches that our society has decided

to preserve or repeat, thereby linking them to the

construction of a social identity.

Speeches are played in their entirety, one at a time,

but fragmented amongst the row of devices. At a

distance, the jumble of speech fragments produ-

ces a single, unintelligible mass of sound; however,

when the visitor approaches a device’s mirror, the

distance sensor interrupts the speech, making it

difficult or impossible to hear. The proximity to the

device also activates a very low sine wave, which

makes the mirror vibrate, distorting and blurring

the visitor’s reflected image.

If the viewer remains close to the mirror only for

a short time, the sound will resume once he/she

moves away. When the visitor exceeds a certain

threshold of time in front of the device, the sound

Deny the Given Voice is an interactive sound ins-

tallation that proposes a two-part reflection on the

violence of saying and silencing, and on the mode

of appropriation of the artistic object. The work

poses negation as the trigger to unfolding its own

meanings.

The piece consists of a display of devices, each

made up of a mirror, a speaker attached to its back

and a distance sensor. These devices project re-

cordings of public speeches with two common

characteristics: on the one hand, these are words

spoken before the public disappearance of the in-

dividual or his death, and they inherit part of their

of a bell signals the temporary extinction of the

sound. This way all devices can be silenced. Af-

ter a while, the devices resume playback, this time

with a different speech.

Silence, therefore, is double. It is brought by the

disappearance of the speeches’ authors, which

confers the discourses with a different meaning.

And it is also present in the functioning of the insta-

llation itself – despite the viewer’s intention to listen,

the sound source is muted as he approaches it.

The piece builds a wall of sound that intensifies

the same repetition that has allowed the spee-

ches to survive the passing of time and resist

the oblivion into which spoken word falls as

immediately as it is being delivered. Intelligibi-

lity in such a sonically dense environment can

only be achieved by interrupting the playback of

the various devices, whatever the content of the

speech or its agent might be.

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SpecioInteractive Media Installation

Page 35: Sound Art, Media Art, Performance, Experimental music · 2021. 3. 17. · 1 Maurice Blanchot. “The infinite Conversa-tion”. Arena libros, 2008 2 Concept by por René Girard en

seeing ourselves outside of our own body, in a

game in which we can briefly see how others see

us, but through our gaze. And our gaze outside

of our body is no longer a look, but an evaluation

of damages. Cocteau proposes it beautifully in his

Orpheus: “Look in a mirror all your life and you will

see death working, like bees in a glass hive”

Specio contains two gazes: the reflective and ho-

rizontal from the mirror and the inquisitive and ver-

tical from the lookout, or the giant. On this double

glance the work unfolds the time dimension, an

element that steals your own image in the mirror.

The estrangement in the mirror vanishes the illusion

of possessing or dominating the reflection. Specio

suggests a man put in parentheses, suspended

between an abstract and isochronous time, and

another concrete and mobile, a man split between

a global temporality and an individual one.

Specio invites us to use the movement - metapho-

Specio is an interactive installation for public space

that reflects on body, gaze and time. An electronic

device makes your image and a bone-clock back

in time when you move in front of it. The more you

move the more the image goes to the past.

Man has a complex relationship with the mirror.

Philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology and

Fine Arts have spoken about this relationship, and

especially New Media Art. In this relationship, the

consciousness of the self and alterity are intermin-

gled with fear to the death, and the consequent

obsession by the control of the own image, so ac-

centuated in our digital culture. The mirror allows

us to experience the profound strangeness of

rical and real - as a way to oppose the passage of

time of my image, and therefore to death, and also

suggests an idea of man trapped in a temporary

no-place between the instantaneity of Media and

real time.

Specio main set up happens in a public space. The

image of the participants is projected on a public

tower -place in which a community clock is usually

housed-, or on a bell tower -a sound architecture

that also structures the time of the community-.

Specio’s double clock replaces the unitary, global

and measured time of the community, by one un-

folded, individual and manipulated by the bodies of

the participants.

The development of the project contemplates to

apply it to emblematic towers of large cities. The

work could be developed in towers of castles or pa-

laces, bell towers, town halls or any building that has

a pronounced vertical space or a communal clock.

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Specio at a public square, Bouesía Festival

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Specio. Indoor version

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future development (Ideal representations)

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Shout-Your-Mouth MachineInteractive Sound Sculpture

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In this case the negation is metaphorical and phy-

sical, because the game lies in pushing a big red

button to silence the voice projected by the device.

What you hear is my personal recorded voice tal-

king about the work. So, when you push the button

you are silencing my own speech. I am interested in

proposing a work that constrains the user to deny

it, a work where there is a circular contradiction be-

tween listening and silencing: maybe I would want

to listen to the voice, but if I want to complete the

The Shut-Your-Mouth Machine is a device inspired

by the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, and its particu-

lar way of negative interaction. The game typically

consists in smashing moles when they pop up from

holes distributed on a plane (watch the video below).

Constructing the meaning of the piece through its

negation is one of my personal interests, and I have

been working on it in recent years, unfolding a critical

approach to such interactive works where the user

has a total degree of control over the mechanism.

game I have to stop the meaning contained in the

voice. So the meaning doesn’t simply come from

my voice, but from the collaboration between my

speech and those who restrain it. In this sense, the

work includes a critical to traditional relationship be-

tween a work of art and its receiver.

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The orthodoxy of the medium and his need to seek

new forms of expression led him towards Sound

Art and New Media Art, focusing a large part of his

activity on sculpture and sound installation, invol-

ving a critical use of interactive devices. As was the

case in the field of composition, his need to help

the medium progress led him to found the elec-

tronic art association EX, of which he is president.

At present, he is developing “Violence in saying

II”, a multidisciplinary project that develops a line

of work of more than ten years around violence in

speech, understood as a movement, of voice and

language, towards the other. The project, which

has been granted funding for the production of

visual arts 2019 by the Comunidad de Madrid,

brings together researchers from philosophy, lin-

guistics, sound art, phoniatrics or logopedics and

is supported by the Spanish Medical Society of

Phoniatrics and the Spanish Association of stut-

tering.

Arturo Moya Villén began his professional deve-

lopment in the field of electroacoustic compo-

sition, training in Barcelona with Gabriel Brncic

and in Rome with Giuseppe di Giugno, thanks

to support from scholarships awarded by SGAE

and the European organization CITE / COMETT.

In those years he began the creation of interactive

environments whereby he already questioned the

concepts of interpreter and music assumed in the

electroacoustic field.

During his career as a composer, his creative activi-

ty was combined with his commitment to context,

becoming president of the Association of Electroa-

coustic Music of Spain, a platform from which he

brings historical figures from the international ex-

perimental scene to Spain for the first time.

As a sound artist, new media artist, composer and

performer, he has presented his works, interven-

tions, actions, videos or installations in auditoriums

and museums in Spain, Italy, Chile, Argentina,

Cuba, the United States, France, Belgium, Mexi-

co , United Kingdom and Germany. Among them:

MACBA, MNCARS (Madrid), IVAM (Valencia),

MARCO (Vigo), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona),

Maison de Radio France (Paris), Fundidora Park

(Monterrey, Mexico), Fonoteca Nacional de Méxi-

co, Institut fur Neüe Musik der Hdk (Berlin), State

University of New York at Buffalo, Centro de Cul-

tura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Center

del Carme Cultura Contemporània (CCCC), Valen-

cia, Museo Barjola (Gijón), Círculo de Bellas Artes

(Madrid), etc.

Bio