Vaivén

Reverberaciones, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. Ciudad de México, 2017.

Vaivén, 2010

Vaivén is a sound-kinetic installation that consists of two pendulums in motion controlled by two electric motors. Each of these pendulums is actually a speaker that travels through the space above the audience.

The speakers reproduce a sound collage made up of hundreds of fragments of presidential speeches that range from Plutarco Elías Calles to Felipe Calderón (the current president during the making of the piece).

The periodicity and speed of the pendulums, as well as the processing and order of the audio sequences in each speaker is controlled by a system developed in Max / MSP and Arduino.

At the background of this work lays the idea of the pendulum as a symbol of the passage of time and the stagnation of the country, as well as the absurdity of political discourse reduced to a conglomeration of phrases that come and go without meaning.

This work was commissioned for the REVOLUCION [ES] exhibition by Mexican curators Rosa Casanova and Esther Acevedo for Laboratorio de Arte Alameda in 2010.

This piece is part of the collection of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, UNAM.