Sound Art / Artists Spotlight:Francisco López & Aaron Taylor Kuffner
By Roslyn WertheimerGet to know our In the Garden of Sonic Delights artists a little better through our Sonic Delights Artist Spotlights!
Meet Francisco López (The [Music] Room) & Aaron Taylor Kuffner (Gamelatron Sanctuary: Suara Sinar (The Sound of Light))
Photo by Francisco López
Francisco López
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world: destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries on the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 150 international artists) has been released by more than 300 record labels / publishers worldwide. He has been awarded honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival four times and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology. www.franciscolopez.net
Photo by Pascal Charles Petit
Aaron Taylor Kuffner
The Gamelatron Project is the marriage of Indonesian sonic and ritual tradition with modern robotics. A Gamelatron is a sound-producing kinetic sculpture featuring instruments from Balinese and Javanese gamelan orchestras, retrofitted with mechanical mallets on sculptural mounts strategically arranged into standalone artworks and immersive installations. MIDI sequences control up to 100 robotic striking mechanisms that produce intricately woven melodic and rhythmic sound. The Gamelatron Project’s mission is to innovatively bring the legacy and creative cultural power of gamelan to new shores, new people and communities, and create a context for it to become a resource for people’s lives. Learn more at gamelatron.com Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Co-Creator and Artistic Director of The Gamelatron Project, is a conceptual artist, sculptor, and composer. His pieces often take the form of longterm multi-year projects that involve in-depth research, collaboration with field experts, and development of specialized skill sets. Each project is uniquely attached to the idea of providing conceptual tools that further the evolution of consciousness through experiences of beauty and the sublime. In doing so he reaches far outside of conventions, pushing the role of art to be a form of service to society. Through his work Kuffner has become a noted composer, kinetic sculptor, electronic music maverick, a machinist, installation artist, ad-hoc engineer, and an ambassador of Indonesian culture. He has performed or presented work more than 400 times in 19 countries in the last 15 years. Learn more at aarontaylorkuffner.com.