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Playlist "37C3: Unlocked"

Buffered Daemons

Pedro A. Ramírez

The work titled Buffered Daemons is a sound performance that attempts to explore the concepts of translation and non-local interaction in the sound realm. It does so by playing with the idiosyncrasies of audio representation/playback and mobilises them through the creation of an expanded musical situation.

In the piece, three different containers of sound are presented: acoustic(Sound diffusion in the architecture), digital (computer based sound algorithms) and analogue (electromagnetic tape and analog processing). This containers, or buffers, are then being intertwined by the performer creating thus sonic textures that interplay with the resonances of the space.

The strategy for the sound performance is to articulate a metaphor of a circular-buffer, a data structure used in Computer Science, to the idea brought upon in Derrida’s interview with Ornette Coleman, in which Improvisation practice in music is understood as a reading in which the borders between reading and writing are obfuscated.

The work is inspired by the concept of daemon and non-locality explored by Timothy Morton in his reading of Plato’s Ion as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.