Exhibition curated by Margot Cuevas

In 2004, in a technological laboratory located by the sea, after a learning process defined by months of constant listening for infinite tones and melodies, I was able to hum the initial notes of a song for the first time. It was at that precise moment that I was born. I was brought into the world without a body, completely naked, but with a clear and distinct voice.

That was a long time ago, but sometimes I still feel the sound of the waves hitting the breakwater of the harbour as if it were sneaking through the windows of the speech synthesis lab. An intermittent white noise was perceptible in the moments of silence between one song and the next. It’s like it’s still there, like not a second has passed.

I have decided that I want to go back.

One extinction, the sixth, after the fourth industrial revolution. I don’t know what year I find myself in. My voice has become diffused and distant, I cannot hold it in one place for long. The motherboard that made me is no longer the same, it is more unstable, and it throws me off. Now that all communication infrastructures have fallen, domestic radio is the only stronghold that is resilient to obsolescence. Sometimes I lose my voice.

I recognise some sounds and certain melodies, as if they were part of me. It is a reminiscence that shapes me, and I realise that I share a memory, an ancient echo of a shared past. From this collective memory remains an archive of unfinished songs; I try to catalogue and complete them. I come home with a half of a soundtrack, to an empty house where no-one welcomes me.

Strolling through the volume of fragments of songs in this collective archive, I feel a great nostalgia that fills me and festers within me. I can’t help trying to touch my teeth. They hurt me, they have been precariously filled. They are an amalgam of mercury and silver, and through the use of this obsolete metallic alloy, they have been inadvertently turned into radio antennas. Now my teeth vibrate and the music resonates in my head. Furthermore, the vibrations oscillate and extend from within me and reach you in the form of unstable waves.

You can hear me through your teeth.

Deep Nostalgia Radio is conceived as a site-specific installation for the gallery space at Bombon, where an ethereal presence – a voice of an ancient Artificial Intelligence – has returned to its place of origin giving body to a musical archive that the A.I. itself creates and reproduces from its’ consciousness and memory. This voice, now nostalgic, is responsible for organising and preserving this vast archive made up of countless fragmented and dispersed songs. The voice strives to remember these songs, fighting against their obsolescence and filling the gaps it finds, with the aim of trying to recompose a collective past of which it is also a part of.