Haptic Eye:

Cervecería Martí in Mexico City and Solina Hi Fi’s studio in London are connected through CCTV-like visual and audio devices, allowing the performances to be broadcasted live from London to the Cervecería. Simultaneously, the artists are able to watch and hear the public attending the event in Mexico City.

The project was organized by The Gallery of Commerce, Solina HiFi and curator Stella Bottai, also based in London. La Galeria de Comercio, created by Abraham Cruzvillegas, Nuria Montiel, Jose Luis Cortes, Alejandra España, Jimena Mendoza and Martín Núñez, is an initiative that presents public art projects in Mexico City. Their activity stemmed from the necessity to act within the public space, creating projects that gather the energy of the street, of its people, motion, rhythm, economy and life.

Playing pure tones, drones and rhythms with hand built analogue synths, live instruments and other boxes with knobs on, Solina Hi-Fi explore the spectrum of raw noise and its permutations, creating heavily textured and driving productions. Strongly influenced by experimental krautrock artists of the late 60’s, synth artists of the 70’s and the early acid house and electronic movements that followed, while also being keenly interested in the pioneering experiments in sonic-physics and psycho-acoustics, of the present and past decades.

When looking at the functioning of machines in contemporary society, one may recognise how, in many instances, their widely diffuse, yet non-democratic employment makes them a rational tool to govern other people for other people. The presence of imperceptible devices effectively monitoring our movements characterises our society as an entire carceral body within which certain behaviours are discouraged in order to provide control over urban space.

Each one of us has certain safe walks and certain excluded walks[3], and all of us are surveilled — our conduct is surveilled. Prison and control do not punish but rather reform our behaviour; we find ourselves living in a state of panopticism[4], a hierarchical principle established through the unilateral scrutiny of the individuals (the so called CIA feeling: they are looking at me, but how do I know when I am looking at them[5]). We are in custody of machines; in silence they watch, in sound we are watched.

Haptic Eye wishes to subvert the condition of passive subjects forced upon us by the systems of control that every day redefine the social territory. Surveillance cameras constantly violate the nature of reality by filtering visual portions of it and aborting its sound. Such removal of the acoustic vibrations that penetrate and fill the environment secures the permanent disconnection and isolation of the individual from its surroundings.
Reality has been cleaved and not cleaned, the infection is trapped inside. We live in the need for human liberation from unnecessary constraints to our freedom and to our full development. Solina Hi Fi open the wound and let the sound flow out. The mechanical eye gains an affective nature, it literally touches.

Friday July 29 Julio 2011, 6pm
Cervecería Martí,
Esquina de calle Comercio y José Martí
Col. Escandón, Mexico City

www.lagaleriadecomercio.org
solinahifi.tumblr.com

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[1] Cfr. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977
[2] R. Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Foucault and the Disappearance of the Human, 1993
[3] R. Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Foucault and the Disappearance of the Human, 1993
[4] Cfr. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977
[5] R. Roderick, Ibidem