Hugo Morales & reConvert – Voltaic Routines
For 38 purpolsless photovoltaic machines and 2 musicians (2023)
Premiere: Gare du Nord, Basel (CH) – 23.11.2023
Duration: 50 min
Voltaic Routines, Hugo Morales
By means of different instruments designed from simple machines, two music operators and their mechanical movemenets become a metaphor for the mundane repetitive labour and automatic operational procedures. The piece revolves around physical human capacities which are challenged through constant interaction with purposeless machines. Throughout the work the two musicians generate sound by manipulating a collection of machines that have no specific function beyond the sound they produce.
On stage the work develops between electric sound exploration and physical performance within a sound world generated by electromagnetism and photovoltaic phenomena in contact with the body.
The work is part of a series of pieces whereby employing different technologies I intend to explore the constant relationship between human labour and the inevitable future of technological unemployment. In Voltaic Routines the musician, as a machine, frenetically and obssesively manipulates other machines, without even noticing that those machines, like himself, have no purposse.
