Agustín
Genoud

Agustín Genoud’s works are as multi-layered as our present is hybrid. As a composer-performer and artistic researcher, he combines his degrees in media art on the one hand, and computer science and AI on the other into a discursive form of artistic research that focuses on staging sound—acoustic research, in other words. He sees voice and sound, materiality and sensuality, language and noise as playing fields for a “way of thinking upside down.”

Born in Argentina in 1984, Genoud grew up in an analog world, but was socialized through digital devices, music videos, and video games. He operates at the intersections of a new media-aesthetic order that hybridizes reality and virtuality, pop and art, the body and technology. His performances and workshops connect humans and machines, and stage this connection as posthuman(istic) audio-visions. Always starting from the body and its all-too-human voice, he uses live electronics to create multiple vocal polyphonies, thus materially expanding the bodily sphere: The Extensions of Man—it is no coincidence that media are described as prostheses of the senses.

As a researcher, Genoud goes about his work systematically: on the one hand, he creates maps in order to understand the physical processes of vocalization; on the other, he develops special software that allows him to convert the data back into sound. As an artist, he sets about aesthetically deconstructing and reconstructing the results of his research. The sounds that result from his acoustic research are “audio-visual encounters beyond all genres.” For Genoud himself is also constantly moving between different ones: he’s interested in tango and pop as well as techno, new music, the queer aspects of baroque opera—and especially the “popular aspects of strange music” as well as the “strange aspects of popular music.”

Genoud is concerned with reconciling contradictions: the bodily and the synthetic, the real and the virtual, the psychedelic and the political, the human and the non-human. He strives to create “acoustic images” that relate the un_related and generate “vocal aspects of Otherness.” To this end, he stages the voices of humans, robots, and animals beyond essentialist and naturalized worldviews, exploring bodily knowledge and endowing the interspecies choir of voices with its own agency: “exile the voice.”

In his process, Genoud pursues a collaborative and inclusive approach by setting aside his own creative authorship in favor of collective experiences and processes; his goal is “to build new relationships of resonance.” This approach echoes Donna Haraway’s concept of kinship between the species—which he also reflects on the level of his cyborg voices. Resonances of the “cannibal metaphysics” theorized by the post-structural anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s can also be heard in the discursive aspect of Genoud’s work, as he translates de Castro’s decolonization of thought into music-making.

When Genoud situates his work in the field of post-humanism, he is not (only) concerned with technical extensions in the sense of transhumanist enhancement; rather, he interrogates what it means to be human in an “era of changes” and creates audio-visions of a non-binary future music that subverts dichotomies through hybridity, making the resonances between humans and non-humans audible.

Text: Anna Schürmer
Translation: G&C Art Translators