Kelly, why don’t we move from 413 to the couch area? is installed in two locations. First, visitors enter a big empty room, 413 in the CIT building at RISD, where they find a very loud noise from the AC system; and second, they move to a couch installed on the other side of the same floor. A long corridor connects the spaces. In the entrance of both spaces a sign shows the title of the installation: “Kelly, why don’t we move from 413 to the couch area?”

The entry point of the piece is the title located in front of room 413’s door. When the audience reads the title card, they discover further that they should keep silent throughout the process and take the first step by spending two minutes inside the room. After reading it, the visitors enter the room as a group. It’s a big empty space; a beam of light enters though the window and there is nothing to look at. The visitors inside the room, no more than 20 persons, only pay attention to the white walls. The sound becomes more and more important as time goes by. The noise is strange; it is the loud, annoying motor of an AC system next door, but this is not explicitly noted. Suddenly, the door opens; the two minutes are over.

Visitors move to the other corner of the building in complete silence. When they arrive, they read another sign; they have to sit on the couch for other two minutes. Each visitor is given a piece of paper with his name and his time slot. They sit down in couples. The couch is vibrating. It doesn’t produce sound but the movement is intense. The vibration is dirty, rough, and at some point registers as similar to the sound experienced moments ago. The body vibrates with the rhythm of the noise. The back becomes more present. After two minutes, the visitors are invited to give their places to another two people.

This installation is a new direction from my other works around the topic of the body sensations. It is framed in some ways in relationship with James Turrell’s pieces in which ritual plays an important role.

The differences with my other works lie in three specific elements: the ritual, the slice of life provided in situ and the kind of sensation that this frequency generates. The ritual in this piece is very rigid and affected by my presence as master of ceremonies, conducting the visitors from one part to another of the building, handing out the paper, sitting and watching them. Unlike other pieces, the visitors cannot talk until all of them have experienced the piece. The lack of social validation of what they feel forced them to trust their own sensations as a unique element of judgment. As they spent the same time in both places, most of them established a relationship between both experiences.

The second element has a crucial importance in the success of this piece. It’s the first time I provided a shared moment of everyday life; rather than asking the audience to walk in my shoes I ask them to walk in their own shoes. They have their own experience and then they feel their own sensation through the body. Their hearing system and skin have completely different thresholds. I just switch the source of the stimulus, the sound, in order to show them the effects of the low frequencies in their bodies.

This freedom that I give to the audience allows for an unguided sensation. Each person negotiates with its own body what they are feeling in both spaces. I don’t know the answers I just try to focus their attention in the fact that uncomfortable vibration is the same noise that they listened before. Kelly, why don’t we move from 413 to the couch area? expresses a negative reaction to the unpleasant body sensation a peer was feeling in room 413; on the couch, this becomes something that our ears cannot hear but our body can feel.

Images: Plan of the Installation, Detail I, Detail II, Physical Sensation.

Performance where real audience interacted with virtual characters in the screen in order to win the auction. Collaboration with Laura Alesci. Video

Interactive sonic performance. Author: Alberto Cerro Performer: Miguel Angel Elizalde Collaborators: Ainara Elgoibar Angela Ramos Miguel Angel Elizalde Variable dimensions. Subwoofer speaker, clay, three electric circuits. Video

It’s 5.50 am and I have to spend one more day here is the final iteration in the same dark room of Fletcher Building. As in other pieces in this series, we can read the title at the door entrance: “It’s 5.50 am and I have to spend one more day here.” The sound in the room is an unrecognizable voice talking in an unknown language audible from the outside. As with It’s his corpse but it’s not him the audience should experience the piece one by one.

Upon entering, the visitor is exposed to an extreme loud voice, almost a noise. He feels stunned. If he moves, the sound follows him. He doesn’t know if the room is big or small, if there is somebody else waiting for him in a corner. He moves very slowly. He extends his arms and tries to calculate the size of the room. He touches the wall at the end of the chamber. His eyes hit a stroboscopic light. The flashes of white light reverberate in his brain. He moves his gaze out of the light; in fractions of a second the light hits the room. He starts to wonder whether the space is not so big as he believed.

He starts to feel a light breeze on his face. He doesn’t know where it comes from. He starts to think about the title of the installation, the sentence he read before entering into the room. “It’s 5.50 am and I have to spend one more day here.” He starts to reflect about what experience the artist had in order to make the piece he has experienced.

This piece has the most sophisticated narrative that I have developed until now. Basically, it has an entry point or first act, where we have contact with the sound, a second act where we are followed by the sound and a conclusion when we are impacted by the light and the wind.

This piece recalls Ed Osborn’s work Feldstimmen, which also uses speech-like sounds. The sound is the key element of this piece. Even though it is made of words, the voice of the singer, meditation master Goenka, features low frequencies created to facilitate meditation. In this piece, though, the sound is played louder than usual in order to recreate the intense attention we put on our senses when we suffer extreme episodes of pain, like the one expressed in this piece.

The intense experience of this piece is rooted in the fact that we receive conflicting sensory information, and we have to make sense of it. We start feeling the sound very close to us. As we move, the noise should decrease, however, we perceive it again as if it is very close. One of the rules of our perception system is that if the stimulus continues, our attention to it diminishes. In this piece, the information about the sound is continuously updated, and therefore our attention is re-focused on it. How we make sense of it is where our mind meets the title; it’s how the artist felt at 5.50, somewhere, someday.

Images: Plan of the Installation, Physical Sensation.

It’s his corpse but it’s not him is the second iteration of the dark room series. At the entrance a sign reads: “It’s his corpse but it’s not him. Please, take your shoes off. It’s a bare feet space.” The audience should experience the piece individually. Two thirds of the floor is covered in metallic mesh, leaving the area of the entrance completely clean. The electric mesh is divided in two parts, connected to a 300-volt circuit. When they stand up in the middle of the room, visitors feel a shiver through their bodies.

Following my first experimentation with heat and sound, this piece explores another way to directly affect the body. It works more like a Polaroid of a moment, which is to say that this sensation doesn’t last beyond the limits of the room. The room is quiet; there is nothing except the cold mesh on the floor. The visitor starts to walk over the metallic mesh. He takes two steps, exploring the walls with his hands. He steps forward and when his toes touch the floor, a buzz suddenly runs up his back. When he presses the mesh with his feet, the buzz disappears. Everything happened in less than a second. After that, he looks for the door and leaves the room.

The title, like all of my pieces, grounds the work in everyday life. Even though looking at a dead body is not very common, everyone will face this experience at one moment or another in their lives. In my case, it was the moment I met my grandfather’s dead body.

People come into the room barefoot. This creates a new interface with the piece: the sole of the foot. This new situation, added to the darkness, forces us to recalibrate our five senses, distributing the attention we give to sight to the other four and generating a more haptic experience. We don’t use our feet for perception. Most of the time we have them completely covered by socks and shoes. The connection between our naked feet and the corpse works as a metaphorical encounter between two bodies. There are two moments for men when it is socially acceptable to be naked: when we are born and when we die. For women, additionally, when they give birth. Our feet establish a dialog on these terms, being naked to make the connection closer.

The use of electricity addresses the meaningful role that electricity plays in our body. Pain is just an electric impulse affected by the brain. The small discharge that we feel is just an example of that principle. Another interesting element is our relationship with electricity. We have a lot of preconceptions about its dangers, therefore when the visitor perceives the electric shock all his or her cautions are activated, creating an agitated atmosphere. In this direction, some people connect this piece with the Painstation machine that generates painful sensations while the user is playing the classic “pong” arcade game.64

It’s his corpse but it’s not him explores the connection between suffering and pain through the use of a 300 volt circuit that the visitor closes when he puts one foot in each part of the mesh. Even through all they feel is a slight buzz, visitors have a shocking experience.

Images: Plan of the Installation, Detail I, Physical Sensation.

Right now, she is having sex with your best friend is the first in a series of three installations set inside a small dark room. Outside the room a sign is posted that reads: “Right now, she is having sex with your best friend.” The room is heated to an uncomfortable 90 degrees and filled with a loud, piercing 1200-hertz tone, both of which make the viewer uneasy. Visitors enter the room in small groups of five people maximum. When they are inside, they experience a strong wave of heat. The room is pitch black, so they extend their arms, trying to figure out its dimensions. The sound hits their ears. It seems to ricochet from one corner to another. It is not harmful but it comes close to causing pain. After some time, visitors start to feel a sort of numbness, and look for the door to exit. When they leave the room, the sound lingers in their heads.

This installation represents a departure from my earlier work in film. It uses sound and physical conditions to make the viewer experience a particular emotion. Some have compared this piece to Bill Viola’s He Weeps for You, in terms of the topic and the use of raw materials such as water or sound to express strong, dark emotions.

This work represents a turning point in my practice in terms of intention as well as medium. It attempts to get deep into the perceptual process. After more than ten years of working with the seductive qualities of the image in advertising, film and video art, I wanted to create the same sensation that an image produces without using any visual elements.

As I mentioned above, the titles in my work are very important. They visualize the content of the image I’m recreating, working as an entry point to the piece. Without them the work would be completely misunderstood. The direct call to the viewer, in identifying “your best friend,” facilitates the immersive process that will happen inside the room.

Another key element of this work is the darkness of the room, which creates a phenomenological effect. Our visual system is so predominant that in order to be aware of our bodies we need to eliminate sight. Once we cannot see properly we have to locate ourselves using the rest of our senses. Our skin becomes more important, our taste becomes more important, our smell becomes more important, and of course our hearing becomes crucial.

The sound generates an “echo” in our brain, traveling from one side of our head to the other, and tuning us into our bodies. Likewise, the heat warps everything, making the body feel agitated, increasing the heartbeat and warming the chest. In fact, this is the sensation that I try to evoke. One of the most common body sensations that everybody recognizes is feeling heat when they are arguing or irritated, for example.

Many people can stay inside the room for only a minute. Others stay for 20 minutes. Those who experienced sound installations before spent more time in the room. We have varying tolerance for extreme stimulus. Regardless of their tolerance for the experience, most visitors emerge from the space and tell me they could relate the sensation they felt inside to the experience I narrate in the title.

Other visitors told me that they did not relate to that experience, however they were able to project themselves into that situation. The difference is the lack of reference in terms of body sensation for the moment the title is talking about. Some people think they experienced something related and others project what they are feeling as what they would feel in a situation like that. These were the ones who spent more time inside the room. The heat and numbness they felt can only be achieved with time. For most of the people, the echo in the brain started during the second minute. The overall sensation when they left the room was one of confusion and agitation.

Images: Plan of the Installation, Physical Sensation.

Experimental video using water and glass to project sea waves. Single-channel video projection, 35:56 min loop

video

Performance in public space; Kennedy Plaza, Providence. Video

Installation with three projections of a movie edited by my movements during sleeping.  Video

Single-channel video projection, 15 min loop