REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Solis

Hugo Solís García
Metaphoric sound in media-art.
http://hugosolis.net
By Karla Martínez García and José Enrique Olivera C.

Made in WordPress, without any obvious information regarding the date, the Mexican artist Hugo Solís García’s web page is employed only for the presentation of the artist and all his art works. In quotation, Word Press mission is “an advanced semantic platform for personal publications with an orientation towards the statics, web standards and usability; in addition to this, it is free and not charged.” Generally, it presents the artist following these parameters: Sound art, Interactive Art, Electronic art; it contains information such as his current work, named Axial. It’s content (presented in tabs) are the projects about his works, concerts, technology (where the relation between art and technology is being explained), his teachings, publications and contact.

Hugo Solís was born in 1946, he was a musician student since his early age, but he began his sound experimentation after his masters in Media-Art and Science at the University of Popeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose works focus is principally towards the creation of interactive and multimedia sound installations, where the observers participation is fundamental to complete his artistic work, which is codified though instruments and technologic tools that go all the way from programming to mechanisms that act like sensors. The usage of the sound is an essential tool in his work, which goes hand by hand with the video, image and kinetics sculptures.     

Metaphors for dead pianos, is a set of sound sculptures constructed with dismembered acoustic pianos. The finality of the piece is bringing back to life the instruments using a contemporary sound perspective which is being modified by technological media. Using sensors and a small computer it registers and analyses the behavior of the public, generating data that’s being reproduced mechanically by the piano. The result is the modulation between the public’s interactions with the decoding of it with J. S. Bach’s “Well temperedes Clavier” book. He believes that J.S. Bach’s musical work suggest the subjective interpretation of who touches it.

Finally, we can understand that Hugo Solis’s work can be studied and appreciated from the media-art vision, based in José Luis Brea’s vision that is focused exclusively in those practices that not only produce objects “for” a given media, but they provide themselves with a mission and an object that’s precisely the specific and autonomist “production of media”, those art works in which the object is himself. This is what Hugo Solís proposed: that the art work itself is being constituted through its production, reconfiguring the artistic practices by the public presentations, generating a space for encounters for the spectators and a common dialogue.

Bibliography

http://hugosolis.net/

Christopher DeLaurenti, Live Dead Pianos, The score column, the stranger, Vol. 19, No. 27. (March, 17, 2013)

Interview with the artist in: http://www.jackstraw.org/programs/mediagallery/solis_10.shtml, (March 12, 2013)