The gathering of our existence can be fulfilled through breathing. It is a vehicle both of proximity and of distancing, of fidelity and of destiny, of life and of cultivation […] Life is cultivated by life itself, in breathing.
LUCE IRIGARAY
What is breath? Across cultures, breath has been considered a manifestation of life, influencing symbolic, conceptual and abstract thought. Cultural arguments and questions around the primacy of breath vs being haunt the writings of philosophers such as Irigaray, Heidegger, Derrida and Descartes.
Anatomically, breath informs the voice: the original musical instrument. One theory suggests that human language began with mimesis; paramusical imitations of sounds in our natural environment; birds, animal calls. Controlling breath through the human instrument certainly resulted in profound changes to our bodies and brains; advancing the evolution of speech and culture. It has even been suggested that the ability to gain breath control was the key to unlocking language and defining our evolution as a species. About 70,000 years ago the technology of wind instruments allowed us to multiply, extend and enhance the effects of human breath..
PneumoMachinic (breath machines) is a sound-art exhibition which considers the influence and cultural impact of breath…from the earliest human speech, to installations evoking the ancient music of Peru and Spain. Three artists have created air-driven, sound installations through exceptional research and complex technologies. Their works explore, expand and compress breath; evoking, mechanizing and instrumentalizing it in meaningful flows, beats, currents and code.
Ali Miharbi has had a long interest in the materiality of sound and the roots of communication. His research into tangible technologies and physical forms of communication, included speech and language itself as a technology. Whispering I reconstructs the human vocal tract, allowing us to hear the earliest speech sounds capable of carrying distinct meaning. The work suggests the origins of language, the development of the human voice instrument, and the meaning of a whisper. This fragile orchestra of vocal tracts, articulate sounds that are both familiar and unintelligible, suggesting a struggle… somewhere between a private whispered communication and the physical need to breathe.
The process of creating El Etorno Retorno, Cristhian Ávila Cipriani required permission to examine and reproduce ancient, pre-hispanic, ceramic musical instruments connected with his own ancestral origins. A selection of exquisite flutes were scanned inside and out using advanced tomographic technology, then carefully 3D printed with ceramic material. A large windmill, built and installed at MALI (Museo de Arte de Lima) for this exhibition, captures and measures wind data flowing over the museum, sending it live to New Media Gallery computers. The wind data powers a pneumatic pump in the gallery, breathing air into the simulated instruments, playing them again after centuries…a haunting, aleatoric orchestra. The artist questions the components of this breath and the performance, and whether sound changes as the body changes.
Xoán-Xil has created Organismo, a series of small wind-instrument automata, each equipped with bellows, pulleys and acoustic mechanisms ; operated through choreographed breaths of air and a series of calibrated movements. Scattered across the floor, this displaced orchestra conjures up what the artist refers to as a mechanical ornithology – some exquisite bird species in a strange, techno-landscape. Organismo was inspired by historic organs from the Baroque, which emerged from the post-new-world-contact period in Spain. The 17th-18th century organ technology reflects the sudden interest in paramusical sounds reflecting a vibrant natural world of birds, wind, rain, hurricanes.
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