Cantus / Discantus
Coco Moya (2023)Produced an exhibited at Etopía Art Center (2023-2024)
Coco Moya. Cantus Discantus. Exhibition view. 2023. The sculptures are singing and talking, creating an expansive posthuman choir. The exhibition shows the yeast molds and the porcelain results, as other parts of the process.
Coco Moya. Cantus Discantus. Sketches made with AI and 3D Modeeling for CNC. 2023. This forms are imagined together with an AI and build in the fablab using CNC and 3d modelling.
An immersive sound installation of ceramics created with artificial intelligence
Cantus/Discantus is a research process that has developed in part during Coco Moya's residency in Etopia. It proposes a tour of the processes, materials and forms with which he has worked, around the idea of polyphony beyond the human. A choir of earthly voices where each sculptural piece is a mouth that sings. The Cantus / Discantus process is based on a dialogue between the will of the artist and artificial intelligence, clay and yeast, thus delegating authorship in a format coral that exceeds the human. This idea of a head that sings, of a person (being that sounds), of a character or mask, is the symbol of that need to find points of contact, binding surfaces between the internal and external, which swell and deflate. Stomach-heads that process, return, incorporate and regroup the materials. If all art is made for a people that does not yet exist, say Deleuze and Guattari, this is a song that sings to a place that does not yet exist. A radical de-territorialization, in permanent openness, birth and therefore also death - a song of lullaby and requiem -, a place where everything begins and everything ends, in that porous, concave, convex, cave skin.
The research process is divided into three branches. First, making the sketches with various image generation artificial intelligences. On the other hand, experimenting with materials, mixing porcelain with yeast. And, finally, the Pyrenean polyphonic song as a structure of relationship with the environment. These three processes are shown more as a search in progress than as a finished process, to tell the potential of this interdisciplinary methodology that hybridizes the artisan and digital manufacturing, the sound with the haptic, which it is not known if it travels to prehistory or to posthistory. A collective imagination is thus intertwined, which brings together voices of many others, to return to us like an oracle a speculative vision of the world “that could be.” The reflection of a polymorphic, mutant, strange collective subconscious... Repellent and attractive at the same time. An uncomfortable soft power, psychedelic but sensitive, where every ambiguous lump, every gap, every concave and convex surface excites our aesthetic-mystical imagination.
More info: Etopia Art Centre