José Manuel Berenguer, Barcelona, 1955.
Director of the Chaos Orchestra and the Música 13 Festival, founder of Nau Côclea, member of the Bourges International Academy of Electroacoustic Music and Honorary President of the UNESCO International Music Council’s International Conference of Electroacoustic Music, he has been bestowed with awards and distinctions from institutions such as the Internationale Ferienkurse Darmstadt, Gaudeamus Foundation, Prix de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, Concorso di Musica Elettronica - Fondazione Russolo-Pratella, CIM-UNESCO International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music, Barcelona Contemporary Music Festival, National Spanish Radio and the Castile-La Mancha Video Award. In recent years, he has tended to express his artistic ruminations through installations and real-time computing devices, therein reflecting on philosophy and scientific history, the limits of language, ethics, life and artificial intelligence, robotics, information metabolism and the limits of human perception and comprehension. His most recent works include installations, such as Silenci, Transfer, La Casa de la Pólvora, Mega kai Mikron and Autofotóvoros, and performances such as Minf, On Nothing, Lambda-Itter (with Jane Rigler), Expanded Piano (with Agustí Fernàndez) and Desde dentro, for microscope, electric guitar and electronic sound and image generation.
His work “Luci, sin nombre y sin memoria” won the 3th edition of the ARCO-BEEP Electronic Art Award.
Works at the collection: Luci, sin nombre y sin memoria, 64 modules development and 21 modules development (Luci 21 modules is on loan of the NewArtFoundation)
Luci, sin nombre y sin memoria, 2008
“Luci” reproduces the functioning of a self-organising system inspired in the behaviour of fireflies in southeast asian mangrove swamps. It has been observed that when the male launches an intermittent signal the female responds with a similar signal. At first, the emissions tend towards similarity before finally matching entirely. This is just an example of what is a general characteristic of nature: the existence of coupled oscillators, systems that tend to stabilise in certain, periodic sequence states as long as fluctuations sufficiently powerful to interrupt the stability of these configurations are not produced.
“Luci” consists of 64 units, each composed of 5 transmitters, sensitive to light and sound whose rhythmic behaviour configures innumerable, chaotic patterns that tend towards stability. The individual components lack information regarding the behaviour of the whole and the behaviour of “Luci” is manifestly more complex than that of its components. The alteration of the ambient luminosity produced by the intervention of the visitor stimulates the communication of the components provoking a new coupled configuration. Although the polyrhythmic patterns of adaptation are not always equal, and despite the fact that the starting points and routes may be essentially different, they always end in the same place. Luci is a proof that the world is full of clocks that tend to coincide and whose heartbeats generate a sound of universal dimensions that give us an idea of the order that we believe we perceive in nature.
“Luci” is, in the final instance, an allusion to the irreversibleness of nature and the absolute security of death.
