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Spotlight On: Cecilia Lopez


Cecilia Lopez: machinic fantasies
Tuesday, May 8, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’ve been living around. New York for the past three years, studying and working on different music and installation projects. My work often explores the physical and perceptual matters of sound through a variety of mediums like composition, objects, video or combinations of them. I also play piano and different synthesizers. I sometimes write songs. I sometimes sing. I used to play in a band, which is called Vigilante Margarita. I am the third of three siblings. I have a black cat named Igor that lives in Buenos Aires.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

The project is based on past explorations that I did around a revolving sound sculpture that functions as a live “mediation machine.” I think of it as a performative installation because it’s presented as a composed space where certain multichannel video and sound techniques are used to play with concepts like immersion, meditation and synchronicity, but it’s also a musical work composed to follow a timeline. The objects in question are like artisanal filter machines made with revolving oil drums. The barrels have a speaker inside that plays music or sound, which is filtered by their spinning as the sculpture is moved by hand. This explanation might sound very complicated but in fact the perceptual principles behind the piece are very simple. I am interested in questioning ideas of content, transmission and the oppositions between object/subject and form/structure. I would say that it’s sort of an industrial or lo-fi science fiction fantasy (à la Raymond Roussel) that plays with very primitive principles of sound an image.

What is your first musical memory?

I can’t really say what my first musical memory was, but I can say that I spent endless hours the first seven years of my life on a swing that my parents have installed in our house’s attic, listening to the radio and singing along with an old cassette player.

What is influencing your work right now?

I work a lot with processes for filtering either sound or visual content. In that way my work is very

permeable. Many things that have been influential for me have ended up becoming material for some of my works. That goes for music, sound recordings from specific places, literature, the world that surrounds me, etc. What is interesting to me about this way of working is that abstract ideas about our perception of sound can be put in conversation or in opposition with more narrative or conceptual ideas that I feel are important.

What is your favorite place to buy records?

Despite the current trend, I really don’t buy records. I don’t own a record player and

in the last few years, my nomadic life has caused me to avoid accumulating stuff… So I am totally out of the vinyl fetishist loop. That said, I can answer the question by describing my extremely modest record collection: Eliane Radigue, Feedback Works; Wendy Carlos, Switch-on Brandenburgs; Anthony Braxton Duets with Muhal Richard Abrams, and a Spanish-language soundtrack from the TV show “Speed Racer.”

What’s your absolute favorite place in the city to be and why?

Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia. You know, there is something about that place… also that was my first connection with New York since I met Phill before coming here. It’s been one of the most interesting, familiar and friendly places that I can think of in this hectic landscape.

Describe your performance at Roulette in three words.

Precarious augmented reality