muu blanco, sound landscape re interpreted movements

these two pieces are raw audiovisual room captures of sound activating movement and dynamics of white lines being projected to a wall inside the artist's studio.

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rg. who are you, where do you come from and where do you currently live?

mb. i am muu blanco born in1966. i come from caracas, venezuela. since 2014 i have been living and working in miami, florida, usa. i am a self-taught artist with a 2004 master's degree in theoretical and practical representation systems. i have been exhibiting and presenting my research since 1990 in different areas of the arts. such projects range from drawing, painting, photography, graphic arts, video art, music, sound art and multimedia installations. since 2003 i have been participating in exhibitions in canada, usa, colombia, puerto rico, dominican republic, brazil, chile, paraguay, argentina, spain, italy, france, germany, england.

rg. how did you start working with video and sound and how did your work evolve and develop from when you started to what you are doing today?

mb. my beginnings in video and sound were in 2002, i was moved by the need to communicate my point of view of the oil strike protests in venezuela and the sound of communications equipment such as fax, telephones, shortwave radio telex and others, all this came together to create my first video art piece "paro 2002-2004" https://youtu.be/f79z2nBiozY - which took me 2 years to finish. later i started making videos based on photographs (slide shows) very influenced by the first time i met a slide projector and i went on that direction throughout 2002. i made about 12 video pieces with image and sound, and at that time i was invited to donate part of these experiments for the future multimedia room and archive multimedia of the museum of contemporary art of caracas sofia imber in which 7 of these first approaches to video art may be found. thanks to these productions in 2003 i was lucky that a musician argenis brito introduced me to the german audio production software "live ableton" in its early version 3 with which i began to be able to mix layers of sounds. before the arrival of live ableton to my studio, i only worked with cutting and pasting sounds extracted from vinyl and cds. it was my initial moment in the world of sampling and from the beginning until now the software imove, with all its limitations, has have been the cradle with which i have grown in this video and sound exploratory research. i come from the 1980's musical culture and i have been a dj since 1995 and this has also informed my video and sound pieces. i began to produce break-beat, drum & bass, downtempo and experimental abstract rhythms and by 2001 i released my first cd los hermanos monte verde "chokolate". i also acquired 2 turntables with which i discovered scratching and i fell in love with this new approach in which i immersed myself for a while. in parallel i continued to develop my career as a visual artist focused on painting, drawing and photography. in 2003 i made a multimedia installation "anachronistic modernism" where i exhibited my first sound piece, which consisted of a car sound system, a car cassette player, and 2 car subwoofers with sand on top. the application of sand was established to make visible the vibrations that the ear does not perceive. the tape player only reproduced the recorded sounds of streets that i made with a journalist's tape recorder. sunsequently in 2006 i began to learn about sound art and its infinite possibilities. in 2007 i made my first individual institutional show "bello horizonte" at the chacao cultural center where i presented an installation with photography, sculptural assembly, video art and sound. i kept learning and investigating and in that process i partake in a workshop of sound art at the embassy of spain in 2008 where i felt i was really entering into the knowledge, concepts, and possibilities of this new dimension of the arts. in 2009 i presented to the goehte institute an exchange of sound recordings of the city of caracas and the city of berlin, so by the middle of that year the material went into an exhibition at the sala mendoza with the german artist robert lippok. he was invited by the goethe institute to come to caracas to make an extensive group of field recordings of the city of caracas and i went back to berlin to continue my field recordings of the sounds of the city and with those documents we created the sound installation ìpaisaje sonoro caracas - berlinî from which i edited my first cd with the archives of the 2 cities https://soundcloud.com/paisaje-sonoro-ccs-brln - after this exhibition i continued exploring and working in this area and in 2013 i did a public show at la trinidad cultural center in caracas with the caa gallery. for this project i utilized soundscapes from the city of caracas and i presented them in collaboration with a young flutist from the manuel rangel national flute orchestra. we performed a live presentation where he played fragments of venezuelan academic music without music scores and i stimulated his memories with sounds of the city. we performed 4 movements with the same contents from which i edited my second cd of sound art called "new venezuelan poetics"

since that publication, due to the political situation of venezuela, i took out to the streets to participate in the active protests in caracas and simultaneously i recorded live sounds of the protests. by july-august 2013 i managed to have my first individual show in new york city in mandragoras art space independent performance program ìblack pointî consisting of an installation of video, collage, objects and sound. as part of the project i did a sound performance utilizing the sound material from the streets of caracas and in collaboration with multimedia artists wolfgang gil and richard garet, as a means to celebrate the closing of the exhibition. already living in miami, i participated in the international biennial of performance of miami 2017, where i once again carried out a performative action with the soundscapes of the protests in venezuela 2014 - 2017:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUX9m1YF5bl/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUXvG0Blbi3/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

rg. describe a decisive moment in your development as an artist, that when you look back you remember it as something significant in your career.

mb. my first public installation in 1995 at the salon pirelli II for young artists at the sofia imber contemporary art museum in caracas, where i presented ìparliamentî, a room closed by a glass door where i held musical conversations with music-loving guests and i recorded cassettes of these dialogues, something unseen in the middle of the art scene in venezuela, and for me this was a significant moment to come to understand that my art was not only traditional media. subsequently i freed myself from the stigma of being artist defined by his/her medium. i understood that i am a creator of ideas produced in multiple techniques from the plastic arts through the immersive and sensory experiences found also in contemporary art...

rg. what is your favorite material and why?

mb. there are really 3 techniques that are intertwined with each other and can be considered representations of moments and situations that i can transform without losing their essential scenic character, which are photography, sound and video.

rg. please describe what is the best context and approach to present your work?

mb. the best moment is the one that comes unexpectedly as a creative engine of extreme fusion, that leads me to an institutional exhibition committed to didactic and research approaches. these are the areas that have given me the most satisfaction in these 29 years of exhibition history.

rg. following the previous question, what do you think your work is in relation to time?

mb. yes. my work is a reflection of my personal life and its evolution over time, each exhibition stages an affirmation of my life and an evolution of life in itself exposing both the professional and the personal aspects of my life.

rg. what drives your practice, is it intuition, ideas, process, control, themes?

mb. what drives me to create is a mixture of the factors in your question, in situations one of those factors is the predominant one, but all of them are present in the creative impulse, they are a set of convictions that are balanced and activate the process of creation and its flow concluding as a public presentation of the work.

rg. also following the previous question, where does the first creative mark start and progress from to later becoming a new piece?

mb. that is indefinable, as i explained before, it is not possible to define it, only one day you are in your daily life and a conversation, something that i live, music, a book, a movie and something starts to go around in my head for hours or days and i start writing something and later i delve into it and i give space to that idea until it is the most important thing. there are others that take much longer to materialize, it depends on the opportunities that arise, it is also a complex mental machinery that is difficult to define, since that it is never the same and idealizing it drives me to turn it into something tangible and with a life of its own.

rg. how much do you take into account the viewer when you do your work?

mb. it depends on the investigation; some are born by and for the viewer and many just for my personal interest. then when the have to be shown publicly, it is when i start thinking about how to show the work and how the viewer is going to experience it.

rg. do you have any expectations of your audience?

mb. i really don't expect much from the viewer, but when there is real communication, the works become further enriched by their comments. in any case whether someone is informed or not from the art world, all those responses that come from someone other than me, expands the range of action of the work and its possibilities of being universal.

rg. what were your influences that you think might have contributed significantly in helping you get to the type of work you are doing today?

mb. history placed in my way fauvism, dadaism, situationism, fluxus and even popart. i think these movements have established a strong influence in my work and many of their philosophies are very present in the work as well.

rg. please talk about the project you are going to present in contour editions and if there is something in particular about this project that you would like to give the visitors some hints about?

mb. these are sound pieces that dynamize the white lines that you see in the video, is basically my proposition for this publication in contour editions. i can say that i am very interested in the soundscape. which is the audio of this piece and fulfills the action of mobilizing a vibrant white line of light over darkness. this piece is made in the context of my studio in the early morning hours where the silence of the environment is almost total since it is necessary for the preponderance of the sounds of the "new venezuelan poetics", and they are the ones that activate the drawing of light on the wall. i documented the process with a video camera, and these pieces do not have post-production, they are a living reflection of this action of sound and light...

miami, august 18th, 2019