UHM’s archive is composed by concepts, images, quotes, sounds, movies, scores, and experiences that deal with the notion of time. For this iteration of the archive we are proposing that the most relevant lens to focus time and space are Nahuatl culture traditional knowledges. The notion of archive is not the one of a fixed space with records inside, but a complex entanglement of philosophies that penetrate our bodies first, and maybe afterwise, produce archiving thoughts and impulses. In this way, we believe our archive should only live through the memory of others. Through listening, observing and present-tense decision making we will speculate about timelines and historiographies creating a narrative that is unfamiliar to a “common-sense” expectation hoping to seed in the imagination of the audience the UHM archive.
Taking into consideration these tensions; the present proposal will provide a lens with which we can focus in the infra-real: the liminal territory between the visible and the invisible in which precarity and danger engender life.
The documentary format inherently produces specific ways of seeing that are often confronted with otherness. In the documentary proposed, ambiguous conceptions of time neglected by modernity are not the object of observation but the point of view that reflects and confronts Western conceptions of time. In this project, time is an excuse to talk about history, Nahuatl philosophies, music and their entanglements. We are hoping that through careful observation the documentary will allow us to speculate about other timelines where we watch documentaries as a side effect of reading subtitles.
CineCer0 and the text display extension produced for this performance has been developed under the support of the Networked Imagination Laboratory (NIL) of McMaster University and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as part of the project “Platforms and practices for networked, language-neutral live coding”.
UHM (Unidad de Hinvestigación & Morbosidades Temporales) is a collective researching the concept of time and the creation of different devices to approach it differently in every iteration. UHM is an on-going process of coding, reflection and live collaborative work which purpose is to affect bodies. UHM members and research centres are not fixed and their work takes place in different parts of the American continent since 2017. This is the third project of UHM and its first live coded documentary
UHM’s first collaboration was an exploration of digital scoring devices presented at Santiago de Chile. A digital multi-modal score was performed unsuccessfully with the intention of producing a calendar. Second project was a broad collaboration with Nanc-In-A-Can, Ruido 13 and Umbral which took place in Mexico City (2019). A 90 minute long exploration of time concepts took the form of a live coded/improvised opera of a running person besieged by 13 time-keeping human/mechanic/digital computers.