Esteban Agosin

Esteban Agosin is a sound and electronic media artist originally from Valparaiso, Chile. He is currently based in Seattle, pursuing his PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. His work engages with the question of how technology could provide a perspective to observe and understand our natural, social and political environment. And also, inquiring on the aesthetic possibilities of using art and technology in order to re-imagine and speculate about our environment. His work involves sound and media installations, robotic objects, and media performance, and it has been presented in art festivals and solo exhibitions in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Spain, Finland, and France. Furthermore, Esteban has worked as an educator at different universities in Chile, Argentina, and the United States, teaching and investigating the intersection of sound, media, and technology.

Artistic Statement

My main interest is the research and development of artistic and experimental practices about the relationship between sound environment and the perspectives that technology provides to understand our sound world.

My practice is regarding the relationship between nature and machine, and how technologies act as a system where this intersection and interdepence generate new possible, imaginaries and speculative worlds that create new scenarios, symbols, and realities.

One of my main topics has been to reach out sound layers where human biology is not capable of listening, sounds that are part of our nature, and also  other creatures, or signals created by humans but traveling encrypted as “noises”. In this sense, in my research I try to put a value on what else is further of our near environment and perception, what other inaudible phenomena we can get, and how art can speculate on the creation of fictional landscapes, opening up the possibility to create a sound ecosystem where nature, machines, and sounds integrate as an imaginary territory.

Currently, my last projects are related to the uses of A.I and its relations with art. And how both systems can dialogue with each other in order to open aesthetic and political discussions. Specifically, my interest is in questions about where the holes, cracks, and gaps of the machinic system are, standing on a hacking and political position as an aesthetic strategy that allow us to re-appropriate, re-imagine and re-define the purposes and behaviors of the A.I systems.