Francisco López (b. 1964, Spain)
Untitled #371, 2019

It’s about how it sounds.

It popped up in my Spotify feed and there was something sounding on the edge between natural and artificial – and that is positioning that I am quite keen to explore. It is so layered in ambiguities – I mean, in a way anything “artificial” is also “natural” as it originates from nature one way or another, any attempt to describe something as artificial is an arbitrary drawing of a line to make some kind of point. At the same time, the world is so rich that sometimes things that appear “artificial” may be most natural (like me, assuming that I was hearing some security system and not bell birds on one of my walks – later resulting in “Subsolarsonic” album) and something “natural” as artificial, like “glitches” in the sounds of my AI-Choir… the latter example is also layered in ambiguities – could “glitch” of a digital system whose performance is ruled by specific algorithms even when “glitching” be described as something “natural” just to discern it from intentionally caused malfunctioning? At what level of complexity can we start ascribing “naturalness” to an artificial system?… I don’t think that López made his piece just to trigger this thought in me, but that’s what excites me about art… it is a bit like a glitch in a cultural system, short-circuiting some trains of thought, causing something unforeseeable to happen… oh well, I guess I am describing the murky end of art where I prefer to dwell myself, there is plenty of “artificial” art out there as well that is carefully designed and controlled to do something specific, like re-iterate an anti-consumerist message.

So yeah, I liked López sound.