Catch 22 goes underground

CATCH22 (work in progress/2004)

Catch 22 is a sound art project created in collaboration with composer Juan Pampín in 2004. It develops the idea of the speaker not as an object that reproduces sound but as an object that generates it. Therefore, feedback becomes the only material a speaker can generate for itself. For Catch 22, each speaker has a unique voice. In this way, any speaker is useful for the project, despite their size, design, specifications and trademark. The generated feedback is transform in real time, digitally and acoustically. The project takes a new form every time, regarding the acoustics, size, history and symbolic burden of the specific site.

Catch 22 goes underground (2005)

In collaboration with composer Juan Pampín and visual artist Daniel Trama, was the second iteration of the project. 8 small speakers and 8 dynamic microphones were installed facing each other from the walls of a 50 meters long pedestrian tunnel. Movement sensors were placed in both entrances, triggering changes in a computer that would transform the feedback sound flux in real time according to the activity within it. In the middle of the tunnel, a video installation built a visual analogy of the feedbacking sound in real time. Pedestrians would also add instability to the system as they alternatively interrupt with their bodies each of the feedback loops as they walked through the tunnel. The architectural space became sensitive to human presence and also to any the traffic going along the avenue above it. The tunnel would become sometimes a roaring engine, others a vocal tract or a wind storm.

Considerations on Autonomy

Why Catch 22 goes underground can be consider an entity? Because it shares what constitutes any entity as such: a relative autonomy.

In opposition to a tunnel of echoes or mirrors, we can’t control this tunnel. An echo or a visual reflex do not interact with us, it obeys us. If we move a hand, our reflex moves his, without delay nor option. That instantaneous and loyal response builds between our reflex and ourselves a perfect and inevitable symmetry. The relation we are engage in with any other animated being or with this tunnel is not of symmetry: the tunnel, like us, has its relative autonomy when reacting to our interventions. That turns it into (or completely emulates) a sonic entity.

Asymmetrical interaction: such is the premise of any entity, of anything with a relative autonomy.

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