Alternate Reality (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) is a video collage in which I utilize created 3D drawings, and found Google satellite photos, Google user 360º images, and YouTube videos to attempt to recreate the neighbourhoods I grew up around in Caracas. It also reflects on the banning of the Google Street View function in Venezuela, creating a gap in our digital-space –one potential way I would have been able to “travel back”. What do these spaces look like in my current memory and how can I fill in the gaps with the use of found footage? Created partially during my time at Residencia Corazón in La Plata, Argentina in March 2019. The sound design is by Felipe Martin.
Category: audio
Digitized Diasporic Memory by Candide Uyanze
Digitized Diasporic Memory explores the relationship, intersections, connections, and divergences of experiences between Black diasporic people. With an understanding of diaspora as networked, rhizomatic, and tentacled, the project seeks to create a space for connection, in an environment where connection is not easily accessed or sustained.
The project visualizes audio segments from synchronous and asynchronous conversations between several members of the diaspora residing across Turtle Island. Each audio node represents a response to the previous participant’s contribution.
Digitized Diasporic Memory expands Le Cunff’s idea of personal networked thinking into collective thinking, or what can be described as mind-to-mind networks, wherein several individuals connect their ideas. The project is part database, part conversational archive, part open-access library, part collective memory bank, part digitized memory, and part chain of memories which bring to the fore the possible connections between Black diasporic experiences and narratives. It addresses the need for intra-diasporic validation, belonging, understanding across differences, and knowledge-sharing.
Candide Uyanze is an award-winning creative technologist working at the intersections of digital media, access, and open source. She’s particularly interested in exploring themes of memory, identity, and virtually-mediated human connection between members of the African diaspora. She does so using web, video, photography, and tech-driven interactive installations.
Seis8s by Luis N. Del Angel
Seis8s is a web-based computer language that allows real-time interaction with digital audio and localized musical knowledge. Seis8s revolves around Spanish-language commands related to Latin dance music such as Cumbia and Salsa. This music is a 20th-century derivation of Afro-Caribbean rhythms for social dancing that developed in the Hispanic Caribbean.
Seis8s is meant to connect the users (i.e. performer and audience) with cultural layers influencing computer-music languages. This project explores 1) a computer-music language to be derived from Spanish; 2) to appeal to an imagined community in/from Latin America; and 3) to explore how sociocultural commonalities of that community intersect with music software.
Special thanks to Drs. David Ogborn, Christina Baade, and Rossana Lara. Thanks to the Mexican Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA), the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Luis is currently a Hamilton-based audiovisual interdisciplinary artist. His interests revolve around critical code studies, new interfaces for musical expression, live coding, Latin American musicology, and participatory action research. Luis is a member of the live coding collectives RGGTRN, the Cybernetic Orchestra and Grupo D’Binis.