Datamorph
“Data that we ourselves have given away so that, using them, a whole constellation of bot networks can generate a parallel self for each one of us; parallel insofar as it operates on our behalf without us knowing it. A parallel self which, from now on, we may call the statistical self or statistical identity, and which is the result of prospecting, predicting behaviours and, ultimately, real operations that bots carry out on behalf of each one of us and each of our supposedly real identities” (Agustín Fernández Mallo).
Credits:
Commissioned by the CSMA Saxophone Ensemble
Direction: Andrés Gomis
Sopranos | Paula Soriano & Antonio Menchaca
Altos | Francisco Alonso & Héctor Sobrino
Tenors | Víctor Orts & Antonio Castaño
Baritones | Jerónimo Fernández & Eduardo Perea
A work for 8 saxophones, electronics and video, built from data collected through a survey conducted with the performers themselves. Personal information, opinions, habits and preferences were used as compositional material, so that the work incorporates and reconfigures those data within its own musical and audiovisual discourse.
In its first part, the piece recreates the universe of tests and forms, staging the saxophonists’ answers and transforming them into sonic and visual material. From that same dataset, the second part develops a reflection on the mechanisms of classification, segmentation and identity modelling characteristic of the contemporary logic of datafication.
The work thus offers a critique of the processes through which our data are converted into statistical profiles, consumer categories and operative identities that circulate and act on our behalf. In this sense, it engages with Agustín Fernández Mallo’s notion of the “statistical self”: a parallel identity generated through the prospecting and prediction of behaviours, where the subject is reduced to a quantifiable abstraction.
