Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

semantic field for the term research. In this interdisciplinary field we understand
that the project presented by the group “Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia”
finds its sustenance, to the extent that it claims a work related to the visual, audiovisual,
sound, Literature, Philosophy, etc., and in which specialists from the most
varied fields have collaborated.
Following Foucault's archaeological method and according to the tremendous
confusion derived from the transformation of our societies into information
societies, whose knowledge generates and produces technology, the research
project presented here has made the search and research of sources compatible
with innovation and creativity itself, this latter understood as the opening-up of
group as well as individual possibilities and mitigating the usual tension between
the so-called industrial societies and the present post-technological societies,
from a renewed concept of time that exceeds its linear and immediate character.
Therefore, the exhibition that summarizes part of the results of a much broader
research is not only aimed at offering new senses and fresher approaches to less
known projects which remained in writing, since this was one of the conditions to
select the works to be carried out, but the acquisition of the capacity to move
between the version and the perversion, from the acquisition of a form of historical
awareness, involved in the archaeological method itself, which takes us as
historical beings unable to revive an age just as it was lived by its contemporaries.
It is evident that we know the current position of avant-garde works and their
position beyond their original pretensions, which we cannot obviate). However,
they also relinquished to the absolute individualization of the references that
characterize postmodernity. This method also strives to investigate those works
which have enlightened a new period or movement but most of them remain
unknown. This is how the concept of antecedent renews in research itself, and is
even extended to some artists and projects not included in the great manuals and
encyclopedic dictionaries and that only by an apparently random historical
selection and the rush of our age have made us forget or leave aside in the
application of the logic of a conceptual added value. Thus, this research is also
structured not only from the best known avant-garde movements and those least
known, but also considers what makes each work more peculiar and original,
those features that make it valid beyond the mere repetition of the topic and the
general characteristics according to what we consider a given movement.
Our societies are also characterized by the tension between the global and local.
This is why it has examined the presence of Spanish and Valencian avant-garde
artist from approximately the first half of the century and the own idea of Europe,
allowing us to get over that historical amnesia that has characterized and
characterizes the national scope beyond the believed reconciliation that involved
the transition and focus on a field where very few specialists have worked and that
remains stored in the bookcases of our memory: Here also many intellectuals
silenced by the dictatorship produced avant-garde projects before the actual or
intellectual exile to which the conceptual scene of the dictatorship relegated for
forty years. Now it is perhaps time to use, give voice or pervert the senses of those
projects and conceive avant-garde movements from the vanguard, and update
research over and over again in the informational spiral. Therefore, research has
to be necessarily complemented with the term innovation, a category that is
essential in the introduction of this exhibition and in the results of the research and
search that the members of LCI and their collaborators have carried out
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In sum, this exhibition offers us only one synthesis of the results, what is shared is
the product of a much further knowledge. We are invited to discovery, to transform
ourselves into archaeologists of our own history and rediscover its hidden
senses, because sharing a research project means producing knowledge and not
converting knowledge into a product, it involved to start a public debate on
meaning, the distribution of a semantic and interpretative added value, and
describe in depth and from all the angles of an interdisciplinary knowledge, a new
form of investigation, that which invites us, as spectators, to research.
Miguel Molina
… a dream project
The exhibition of the research group “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”
(“Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia”) (L.C.I.), presents the results of the
research project “Historical avant-garde Sound Art works ( 1909-1945): a
remake" approved by this Polytechnical University of Valencia in 2002 and
completed in 2004. This link is the main reason to show this work in the Exhibition
hall of the UPV Vicerrectorate for Culture. which allows us to share it with our
university community. Our project, a dream two years ago, is coming true now.
Once completed, we needed to transmit it to the people close to us, those who
believed from the beginning that it was possible and necessary.
After two years of research and meetings, of quiet and noisy enjoyments, which
have come along the ups and downs of our daily life…, but there was always
some spare time to share a common complicity as a group, which provided us
with the energy to advance and keep the project going. One of the achievements
of a project is that it demands to share something more than a space, a greeting or
a task.
One of the main reasons to have chosen this research topic is because we believe
as artists, professors or former Fine Arts students, that sound language has come
closer to visual arts throughout the history of art and specially in the historical
Avant-garde. Now it is usual that the different artistic languages coexist
simultaneously, and that the current graduate studies of the Faculties of Fine Arts
include not only the new image processing technologies, but also Sound Art in its
own independent and interdisciplinary dimension, not necessarily subject to the
image, but sometimes generating it.
Another reason to propose this project is that a great deal of the background of the
use of sound in art is lost or destroyed, given the experimental character of many
of these initiatives and the difficult years of the period between the wars. The
result of all this is that the essential material of the works has been preserved only
partially (drawings, photographs, pamphlets or written documents), which does
not allow to see and listen to them in their greatest dimension, just as they should
be. This is what led us to recover this cultural legacy so as to be able to hear and
touch it.
That research effort of avant-garde artists, who have been our spiritual guides,
motivated us to start the recovery of their concerns and discoveries that have
been the basis for many experimentations nowadays. To give shape and sound
again to those sketches, images or thoughts, involved to rethink their utopia and