I feel something about the projects’ origins can be conveyed by a picture of me as a science student at the University of Hiroshima. It’s a bit cliched, but I was a goth. Dressed all in black, wore black nail polish, had my hair up in a ponytail, and sometimes went barefoot. I would be dressed this way as I peered into microscopes and dissected fish. My teachers let me go my merry way, thinking, I suppose, that as long as I got my work done, my personal choices were up to me. Plus, I was a foreigner anyway.

Tad Ermitaño, whose influence can be traced back to the late 1980s, is a significant player in new media art in the Philippines and South East Asia—regarded as one of the country’s forerunners of sound art and experimental film. His artistic practice has developed into a remarkable assertion of technology to create projects that examine the processes, senses, and structures surrounding man’s relationship with machinery.

His work frequently involves the manipulation of audiovisual events, which the artist mixes with an instinctual aesthetic awareness of the relationship between temporal and spatial aspects. Ermitaño uses a variety of technologies to communicate his fascination with sound, including analogue circuits (Bell, 2011), mechanical instruments (Hasa, 2015), and computer programming (Sammy and the Sandworms, 2013). His work also holds interactivity elements, allowing for flexibility in how they are displayed and experienced. For instance, Twinning Machine (2012) is a computer-augmented video installation that simultaneously receives a live video feed from a camera, edits the film, and projections the edited pictures using software the artist created.

Held at Art Laboratory Berlin, Tad Ermitao now brings us; RADYO SOMATODELIA, Experiments in Sonic Animism: Somatodelia is an attempt to help dissolve the mind/body dualism by trying to show how the idea that the mind as this invisible, non-material, ‘spiritual’ independent thing is a falsehood that sweeps under the rug all the ways it depends on, originates in, is fed by the physical. For instance, when a person trembles, it is these physical gestures by which I know his mental state. And by ‘know’, I don’t mean I deduce their mental state from the signs they display, but that these movements of their body are either mirrored or entangled in our own. The relationship between the observer and that which is being observed is thus intersubjective – we are merged in empathy. (Tad Ermitaño, Notes on Somatodelia)

Η συνέχεια εδώ.

Radyo Somatodelia runs until October 9 2022, at Art Laboratory Berlin.