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Triptych Tropes

Coco Moya (2023) 
Performed and exhibited at UCM Fine Arts School (2023)





Coco Moya. Triptych Tropes. Performative conference. Video Capture. 2023.


Coco Moya. Triptych Tropes.
Performative conference. 2023.
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Sound Geomancy, Landscape as score 


Abstract


This research, entitled «Sound geomancy. The landscape as a score», deals with how aural thinking is essential to establish a dialogue with our environment and with our inner selves. It wonders how technology, music and nature are assembled in the landscape through the metaphors of sound. Introducing references from the art practice, the musical ethnology, the field of archaeoacoustics and the media archeology, a geo-sonological story is is presented, beginning in prehistory and continuing in Post-history.

When it comes to give meaning, create knowledge, and navigate the world, we can find echoes between indigenous cosmologies, -intended as popular, pagan, and ancestral practices of relationship with matter/spirit-, and the technological culture. Post-internet network culture relies again on magical thinking, according to which all beings -living, non-living, almost living, human, non-human and more than human- are intertwined in resonant kinships. Sonic imagination becomes a geological imagination that crosses the strata of history through musical metaphors and metonymies. In contemporary art practices that use technology to create intelligent objects and places, giving them a voice, listening to their inaudible lives, there is the same ancestral need as human beings to integrate into the world. The place, overcrowded with materials that are media, objects that are alive, voices and memories, is the starting point for works and compositions that are trying to read the landscape.

The territory is crossed by telluric energies and inhabited by cyborg amalgams, shaping a polyphonic writing. One can take it as a score that can be interpreted using rhythms and melismas playing with all this elements and putting them in contact. This is what we call speculative listening of a place, which can intuit with the sound the forces that inhabit it. Under these premises, sound geomancy is formulated as an open tool. A methodology for the interpretation of a place through a more relational than representational kind of music. Transcendental in its wildest materiality. Sound geomancy, in short, proposes a sort of interaction with a complex and interdependent environment, which includes the immense human capacity to imagine, inhabit, and create the world through hearing.

Keywords: sound art, site-specific, geomancy, speculative listening, antropocene, interactive media, sound studies, media archaeology, archaeoacoustics, ethnomusicology, contemporary art. 

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PhD Presented at Complutense University of Madrid, 16th January 2023, classified as «Excellent» with a distinction «cum laude» given unanimously for her doctoral thesis.
Thesis Committee: Bárbara Fluxá, Concha García, Paz Tornero, Mikel Arce y Miguel Molina Alarcón.