Artworks and Installations by Hugo Paquete
Post-Digital Sonic Media Art: Composing Systems of Resistance through Sound
Nowherezone: A Descent into Technological Melancholy. Hugo Paquete, 2010
Nowherezone unfolds as a speculative descent through an alien environment. The work presents a fragmented, hypnotic sequence in which a technological object, suggestive of a probe, capsule, or vessel fragment, drifts downward through an unfamiliar atmosphere. Neither origin nor destination is disclosed. Spatial coordinates dissolve into fields of aqueous blue and pink, gradually resolving into the unsettling geometry of an unknown surface. The descent never culminates in impact. Instead, it reaches a state of mechanical delirium: metallic structures spinning at impossible speed, punctuated by a violent white strobe that collapses the image and resets the loop. What emerges is not a narrative of exploration, but a suspended condition, arrival perpetually deferred, function slowly eroded.
Project Specifications
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Single-channel video installation
DVD, 4:3, color, sound
Duration: 07′15″ (loop)
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Context: An early-career work first presented at Casa e Museu da Quinta de Santiago, Leça da Palmeira, Portugal. It prefigures the artist’s core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Critical Positioning
Descent Without Destination: The work stages a collapse of trajectory. The vector of exploration loses intent and becomes passive motion, a quiet surrender to an environment that is indifferent, mesmerizing, and profoundly non-human. Failure here is not catastrophic but absorptive: technology is gradually subsumed by a space that neither resists nor responds. Visually, Nowherezone draws on the legacy of early planetary imaging and analog science fiction. Grainy textures, saturated chromatic fields, and the 4:3 frame evoke a future once promised through low-resolution transmissions and speculative optimism. The alien landscape is presented not as spectacle, but as an unreachable field—perceived too late, or from an irreducible distance.
Sound, Space, and Remote Observation: Sound structures the work’s emotional and spatial register. Rather than cinematic emphasis, the audio constructs an atmosphere of isolation: processed signals, distant resonances, and low-frequency vibrations suggest a machine continuing to transmit beyond usefulness or reception. The listener occupies a position of remote observation, attuned to a signal that may no longer have an addressee. Installed within an architectural ruff or structural cavity, Nowherezone compresses cosmic distance into intimate space. The gallery becomes an observational chamber, as if the viewer were positioned inside a derelict vessel or beneath a failing transmission point. This spatial inversion transforms observation into an embodied condition, binding the immensity of the extraterrestrial to the overlooked recesses of the built environment. Within this structure, Nowherezone articulates a poetics of technological melancholy. It asks what it means to witness events that unfold without human presence, purpose, or future. The viewer becomes a belated observer of a beautiful yet indifferent signal, data without destination, vision without agency.
Conclusion
Nowherezone is a meditation on solitude, distance, and the quiet exhaustion of exploratory machines. Rather than critiquing technology directly, the work lingers on its affective residue: the loneliness embedded in tools designed to see on our behalf, and the indifference of the environments they encounter.
By binding the cosmic to the architectural, the infinite to the interstitial, Nowherezone suggests that the melancholy of failed or incomplete futures does not remain elsewhere. It returns, resonating softly within the forgotten cavities of our own constructed world.
Keywords: #AlienSublime, #TechnologicalMelancholy, #PostHumanPerception, #SpeculativeDescent, #NonHumanEnvironments, #SpaceImaginaries, #RemoteObservation, #LoopedTemporality, #FailedArrival, #ArchitecturalProjection, #ImmersiveSound, #MediaArchaeology, #Dromology, #TechnologicalExterior, #PostHumanGaze, #VideoInstallation, #HugoPaquete, #2010
Experiments for a Tragic Day:
A Loop of Suspended Catastrophe.
Hugo Paquete, 2010
Experiments for a Tragic Day unfolds as a time-based environment structured around suspension, repetition, and unresolved descent. Conceived as a looping video and sound installation, the work constructs a perceptual field in which image, sound, and spatial resonance remain locked in a state of perpetual return. Rather than narrating a singular event, the piece stages a condition: a continuous falling without impact, resolution, or release. The visual and sonic materials suggest pursuit, collapse, and exhaustion, yet refuse causal explanation. Movement is arrested within the loop, transformed into a cyclical architecture that replays the same temporal fragment without progression. The “tragic day” does not pass into memory; it persists as an ever-present remainder, a suspended moment replayed until meaning erodes into affect. What emerges is not a representation of catastrophe, but its durational afterimage.
Project Specifications
Artist: Hugo PaqueteFormat: Video and sound installation
Duration: 12′00″ (loop)
Sound: Multi-channel
Year: 2010
Context: Early-career work presented nationally and internationally across diverse contexts, from gallery installations to video art and media festivals. The project establishes core concerns later developed in the artist’s research on post-digital sonic media, looped temporality, and the aesthetics of technological failure.
Critical Positioning
Temporal Entrapment and the Architecture of Return: The loop operates as a temporal device rather than a neutral container. By withholding narrative development, Experiments for a Tragic Day suspends the viewer within a present that cannot resolve itself. Time becomes recursive, haunted by its own repetition. The fall is neither completed nor escaped; it is endlessly deferred. This cyclical temporality evokes a condition in which history no longer advances but reappears as residue, replaying its own impossibility of closure. Rather than dramatizing tragedy, the work flattens it into duration. Catastrophe becomes ambient, felt not through spectacle, but through exhaustion, persistence, and return.
Sound as Vibrational Territory: Sound functions as a primary structuring force in the work. Through spatial diffusion, the sonic material shapes the exhibition environment into a vibrational territory that extends beyond the screen. Low frequencies, resonant textures, and iterative sonic gestures map tension directly onto the listener’s body, producing a form of embodied instability. Image and sound intra-act rather than align. Their relationship generates friction, reinforcing the sensation of pursuit without arrival. The sonic field does not accompany the image; it activates the space itself, transforming the installation into an acoustic condition rather than a representational scene. Tragedy here is enacted through resonance and repetition, not depicted.
Technological Memory and Post-Digital Failure: By embracing the loop, a form historically associated with analogue recording and early electronic media, the work foregrounds repetition, decay, and temporal glitch as compositional principles. The system does not move forward; it turns inward. Progress collapses into recurrence. In this sense, Experiments for a Tragic Day engages with the technological unconscious of digital culture. Obsolescence, entropy, and failure surface as aesthetic material. Technology appears not as a tool for mastery or acceleration, but as a haunted apparatus, one that endlessly records, repeats, and erodes its own time.
ConclusionExperiments for a Tragic Day functions as a device for critical listening and situated perception. It invites the viewer to inhabit tragedy as a suspended condition rather than a historical event, a spectral present continuously mediated by the very technologies that attempt to capture it. The work does not seek redemption, resolution, or escape. Instead, it remains within the fall, returning, again and again, to its fragile resonance. In doing so, it establishes an early and enduring framework for Paquete’s research-driven practice: one in which sound, time, and technological memory converge as sites of speculative inquiry.
Keywords: #PostDigitalAesthetics, #LoopedTemporality, #SonicInstallation, #SuspendedTime, #TechnologicalHauntology, #CriticalListening, #MediaArchaeology, #SystemFailure, #SpectralTime, #VibrationalSpace, #VideoSoundArt, #HugoPaquete
Inner Limit. Hugo Paquete, 2010
Inner Limit transforms the gallery into a clandestine observation post. The work presents found footage of a military tank undergoing acoustic analysis—a “sounding” at the exact point where the projectile is fired. Rendered in a disorienting thermal palette, this is not a depiction of the tank, but a visualization of its operational stress test. Projected discreetly low on the wall, the installation demands a physical, ear-to-the-ground engagement. This posture shifts the viewer from a passive observer to an embedded witness, implicating them in a forensic listening of militarized technology.
Project Specifications
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Video installation
DVD, 4:3, color, sound, 1’ 42” (loop)
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2010
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at ESAD.CR (Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha). It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Critical Positioning
The Image of Sounding: The core of the work is the image of the test itself. It presents the moment invisible forces—acoustic shockwaves, structural resonance—are made visible as data for diagnostic purposes. Inner Limit critiques not data translation, but the epistemology of making violence legible through its own aftermath. The blast site becomes an analytic site, collapsing the ballistic test range into the white cube.
A Media Archaeology of the Diagnostic Gaze: Formally, the work excavates the history of operational images. The 4:3 frame and thermal aesthetic directly cite night-vision, sonar, and medical scanning—interfaces designed for assessment, not representation. By isolating this moment of techno-scientific scrutiny, Paquete exposes the epistemological violence of measurement: how militarized vision constructs its objects through regimes of visibility that anticipate function, endurance, and failure.
Agency in the Assemblage: The installation stages a post-human network. Meaning is distributed across an assemblage of actors: the tank’s armor, the acoustic shockwave, the thermal sensor, the monitor, the gallery space, and the viewer’s own perception. No single element is sovereign; the aesthetic event emerges from their intra-action. The viewer becomes a participant in a hidden circuit of evaluation.
Keywords: #HugoPaquete #InnerLimit2010 #VideoInstallation #AcousticTest #MilitarizedTechnology #OperationalImage #DiagnosticGaze #MediaArchaeology #FoundFootage #ThermalImaging #PostHumanAgency #Biopolitics #ForensicAesthetics #TechnologicalUnconscious
Phonology: An Archaeology of the Pending Signals: Catastrophe, and the Politics of the Siren. Hugo Paquete, 2009
Phonology (2009) is an early work that interrogates the signal of catastrophe itself. By subjecting found footage of an industrial warning siren to systematic digital corruption, the piece suspends the anticipated tragedy it announces. The glitch disrupts the siren's function as a tool of state or industrial power, transforming it into a site of critical inquiry. This work shifts the focus from the content of the warning to a forensic analysis of the apparatus of warning, exploring the politics of fear embedded within technological systems.
Project Specifications
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Year: 2009
Format: Single-channel video installation
Duration: 3:08 s.
Source Material: Found footage of a rotating mechanical/electromechanical siren (air-raid/public warning system).
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at ESAD.CR (Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha). It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Paquete's selection of this source immediately anchors the work within a politics of anticipation and collective trauma. Phonology intervenes precisely at the juncture of anticipated tragedy. It does not present the catastrophe that follows the siren's call but instead interrogates the signal of catastrophe itself, subjecting the very medium of warning to a process of systemic collapse.
Technical Process as Affective & Epistemic Method: Suspending the Warning
Critical Positioning
The integration of the siren fundamentally repositions the work:
Beyond Glitch Formalism: The siren injects an urgent biopolitical dimension, transforming the work into an early study of biopolitical sonification, the rendering visible of technologies that manage populations through fear. Media Archaeology of Fear: The work acts as an excavation of the technological unconscious of fear, unearthing historical strata of 20th-century trauma embedded within the siren as an object.
Prefiguring a Critical Sonic Practice: Phonology establishes a core principle: sound (and its visual representation) functions as a forensic tool for infrastructural and political critique.
Conclusion: The Prototype of a Critical Methodology
Phonology is a research prototype. It establishes the operational DNA of Paquete's integrated practice: the strategic use of system failure to interrogate broader technological and social systems. By targeting the siren, an object at the nexus of technology, politics, and psychology, the work moves beyond a critique of the medium to a critique of the message the medium is weaponized to carry. It marks the moment his focus shifts from interrogating how a medium works to interrogating what a medium is made to do.
Keywords: #BiopoliticalSonification #MediaArchaeology #GlitchAsMethod #TechnologicalUnconscious #EarlyWork
Transmitting: A Critical Perspective of Sound Object and Media Archaeology.
Hugo Paquete, 2009
Composed in 2009, Transmitting marks a moment within Hugo Paquete's early investigations into signal, warning, and sonic authority. Conceived alongside Phonology, the work operates as its essential conceptual counterpart.
Where Phonology undertakes an archaeological excavation of the latent signal, its delay, suspension, and deferred meaning, Transmitting concentrates on the moment of emission itself: the act of annunciation as a continuous, coercive event. The title is deliberately utilitarian, naming not a narrative but a condition: ten minutes of uninterrupted broadcast. This is not a study of consequence, but a durational immersion into the process of warning, placing the listener inside its unbroken, oppressive flow.
Project Specifications
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Year: 2009
Format: Single-channel video installation
Duration: 10 min.
Source Material: Found footage of a rotating mechanical/electromechanical siren (air-raid/public warning system).
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at ESAD.CR (Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha). It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Research & Critical Text
The Siren as Found Object & Methodological Focus
The work subjects found footage of a rotating mechanical siren, an internationally legible apparatus of war, emergency, and systemic rupture, to a methodical process of sonic and temporal magnification. Paquete's approach is one of amplification through reduction. By isolating the siren's vibrational essence, the work abandons representational alarm in favor of resonant intensity. The piercing call is neither fragmented nor disrupted; instead, it is elongated, thickened, and transposed into a dense, low-frequency drone. Urgency is not released but suspended, converted into a continuous state of looming imminence.
The Anatomy of the Broadcast: A Tripartite Structure
The ten-minute transmission operates simultaneously across three interlocking strata:
Sonic Substance: The auditory field is reduced to its foundational frequency. The recognizable alarm collapses into a persistent vibrational mass, bypassing symbolic cognition to communicate dread at the level of texture and somatic pressure.
The Signal as Environment: Detached from its instrumental directive, the warning sheds specificity and becomes atmospheric. The imperative to act dissolves into an ambient condition—an enveloping sonic field that must be endured rather than decoded.
Ontological Suspension: The listener is positioned within the dilated present of the alert, suspended between peace and catastrophe. Narrative resolution is refused, trapping perception in a sustained attentiveness to an event that may never arrive. Through its emphasis on sub-frequencies, Transmitting performs an act of infrasonic attention. It insists the siren be felt as much as heard, drawing focus to the vibrational substrate of control infrastructures. Authority here is exercised not through intelligible commands, but through the management of vibration—operating beneath language, directly upon the nervous and collective body.
From Imperative to Condition: Reconfiguring the Source: Transmitting fundamentally reconfigures its source material. The siren, engineered to provoke immediate, reflexive compliance, is reframed as an object of durational scrutiny. The fixed ten-minute encounter inverts its intended function: instead of triggering instant reaction, it induces a prolonged state of embodied anxiety. The warning no longer commands action; it becomes an inhabitable atmosphere, metabolized slowly as continuous physical pressure.
Positioning within the Research Trajectory: Within Paquete's broader research trajectory, this work functions as a crucial precursor. It extends the forensic logic of Phonology into the domains of drone ontology and vibrational materialism, anticipating later inquiries into biopolitical frequency. By foregrounding the low-frequency control mechanisms embedded in public warning systems, Transmitting articulates an early formulation of the artist's core methodology: using sustained sound to interrogate the social, political, and affective forces these technologies transmit and enforce.
Conclusion: A Foundational Broadcast: More than a video work, Transmitting operates as a durational probe into the physics of fear. It proposes that critique need not interrupt a control signal, but may instead extend and intensify its resonant properties until its latent violence becomes perceptible. In the relentless drone of the siren's magnified cry, command does not collapse; it mutates. A discrete alert is transformed into a generalized condition of apprehension. The transmission becomes its own message, and the message is a state of being.
Keywords: #BiopoliticalSonification #VibrationalOntology #DroneAesthetics #MediaArchaeology #Siren #EarlyWork #Transmission
Drift: Dromology of the Fallen Object: Velocity, Catastrophe, and the Technological Exterior.
Hugo Paquete, 2009
Drift (2010) isolates a singular, elemental event: the gravitational descent of a spent rocket fuel tank from orbital space toward Earth. Stripped of narrative, sound, and spectacular resolution, the work concentrates on the suspended interval between acceleration and impact. What unfolds is not catastrophe, but inevitability—a technological remnant surrendering to gravity.
The falling object is presented as a body without agency, purpose, or command. Its slow, continuous descent exposes the latent trajectory embedded in all systems of speed: every ascent already contains its own return. In this sense, Drift operates as a meditation on the dromological condition of technology, its vector, its exhaustion, and its afterlife as inert matter.
Project Specifications
Title: Drift
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Year: 2009
Format: Single-channel video installation
Media: DVD, 4:3, color, silent
Duration: 05′58″ (loop)
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at the Museu Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Amarante, Portugal, as part of the 2010-2011 grant exhibition catalog. It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious, dromological critique, and vibrational ontology.
Critical Positioning
Silence as Analytical Space: The absence of sound is a structural decision rather than a negation. Silence in Drift removes all cues of drama, scale, and emotional guidance, forcing the viewer into a purely optical relation with the event. The fall is not explained, dramatized, or intensified; it simply persists. This silence produces a vacuum of interpretation in which time becomes the primary medium.
Deceleration and the Refusal of the Sublime: Drift performs a critical inversion of the techno-utopian sublime. The rocket, an emblem of vertical escape, expansion, and progress, is reduced to a discarded component, detached from mission or destination. By removing the moment of launch and any implication of achievement, the work enacts a forensic reduction. What remains is technological residue in motion, neither triumphant nor failed, but simply falling. Deceleration is the work's central epistemic strategy. Objects traveling at orbital velocity are effectively invisible, existing only as data within tracking systems. By slowing the fall and fixing it within a continuous loop, Drift enforces visibility. The tank becomes an archaeological artifact of the Space Age in real time, suspended between engineered precision and gravitational inevitability.
Virilio, Dromology, and the Integral Accident: Drift engages directly with Paul Virilio's philosophy of speed and his concept of the "integral accident." For Virilio, every technological invention produces its own specific disaster: the ship invents the shipwreck; the plane invents the crash. Paquete extends this logic to astronautical infrastructure. The invention of the rocket necessarily invents the falling stage, the orbital remainder, the slow return. Crucially, the work refuses the spectacle typically associated with technological failure. The "accident" here is neither explosive nor exceptional. It is calm, continuous, and governed by gravity itself. The fall is not an error in the system but an intrinsic consequence of it. Through this lens, Drift also exposes the political geography of speed. Orbital decay paths are not abstract lines but material vectors that intersect with terrestrial territories, often far from the centers of technological power. The falling object traces an unacknowledged externality of progress, revealing how acceleration displaces its consequences elsewhere.
Exteriorization and Technological Return: The work interrogates the human drive toward exteriorization, the projection of cognition, infrastructure, and ambition beyond planetary limits. Space exploration is framed not as transcendence, but as displacement. Drift renders visible the feedback loop of this expansion: the accumulation of technological remains that must eventually return. The tank occupies a liminal state between object and debris, between precision instrument and future scrap. It is neither functional nor destroyed. In its silent descent, it becomes a material reminder that technological progress does not eliminate gravity, time, or consequence. What is expelled in the pursuit of escape inevitably re-enters the world as matter.
A Loop Without Resolution: Structured as a continuous loop, Drift refuses narrative closure. The five-minute, fifty-eight-second duration mirrors the endless cycles of orbital decay that now encircle the planet. The fall does not culminate; it persists as condition. This temporal structure positions the work as an inquiry rather than a statement, an examination of velocity through its exhaustion. Within Paquete's practice, Drift stands as an early and incisive meditation on infrastructure, speed, and technological unconscious. It asserts that to understand acceleration, one must attend to deceleration; to understand ascent, one must confront return. In its silence and restraint, the work becomes a sober witness to the dromology of the Anthropocene, where every launch meticulously scripts its own inevitable fall.
Keywords: #Dromology #PaulVirilio #IntegralAccident #SpaceDebris #VibrationalOntology #TechnologicalUnconscious #MuseuAmadeoSouzaCardoso #2010 #VideoInstallation
Opera One: Allegoric Vision for an Empty Artefact . Hugo Paquete, 2009
Opera One (2009) is a single-channel video installation that transforms computational error into a site of vocal and affective resonance. The work originates in a curated archive of computer error messages, system alerts, and diagnostic failures. Stripped of their original function, these texts are compiled into a score—a libretto of malfunction—and are performed solely by the human voice. Through sung, spoken, and intoned recitation, the utilitarian language of system failure is displaced into a register of hesitance, breath, and emotional inflection. The result is an allegorical opera without spectacle: a study in how technology speaks in its moments of collapse, and how the human voice, inhabiting these failures, translates operational noise into fragile, transient connection.
Project Specifications
Title: Opera One
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Year: 2009
Format: Single-channel video installation
Media: Digital video, color, sound
Duration: 11′47″ (loop)
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at ESAD.CR (Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha) and presented in other events. It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Critical Positioning
Libretto of Failure: From Error Code to Operatic Score: The foundational gesture of Opera One is an act of media-archaeological recovery and translation. Error messages, designed to be invisible, corrective, and transient, are collected and reframed as textual artefacts. This compilation forms what Paquete terms an “empty artefact”: a text emptied of its instrumental purpose yet saturated with the latent affect of systemic anxiety. By transcribing these messages into a performable score, the work inverts the logic of computation. Where the computer seeks to resolve and move past error, the performance insists on dwelling within it, transforming failure from a bug into a site of aesthetic and ontological inquiry.
The Voice as an Interface of Fragility: Central to the work is the human voice, deployed not as a medium of expression but as an interface of vulnerability. In singing system alerts (“Fatal Error,” “Access Denied,” “Runtime Exception”), the voice does not master the language of the machine; it stutters, repeats, falters, and breathes life into its sterile syntax. This performative act creates a schism between semantic content and somatic delivery. The message’s meaning recedes, while its delivery, its rhythm, pitch, grain foregrounds the embodied labor of articulation. The voice becomes a threshold where technological precision encounters human imprecision, generating a hybrid form of speech that belongs neither to the human nor to the machine, but to the shared space of breakdown.
Allegory of the Empty Artefact: Toward a Poetics of Systemic Exhaustion: Opera One operates as an allegory for technological exhaustion. The “empty artefact” is the error message itself, a signifier that points to an absent function, a void in the system’s logic. By performing this emptiness, Paquete constructs a poetics of the post-functional, where meaning emerges not from utility but from affective residue. The installation visualizes this allegory through a restrained, almost clinical aesthetic: the performer, often framed statically, becomes a medium channeling the systemic unconscious. The setting is not a stage but a testing environment, a space where the performance of failure is both experiment and elegy.
The Technological Unconscious and Biopolitical Sonification: The work anticipates Paquete’s enduring investigation into the technological unconscious, the latent anxieties, desires, and forms of care embedded within technical systems. Error messages are fragments of this unconscious, coded expressions of a system’s instability. By sonifying them, Opera One performs a kind of diagnostic listening, making audible the hidden emotional substrates of digital culture. This act extends into the biopolitical: the voice, by inhabiting the language of system commands and corrections, mirrors the ways in which subjects are interpellated by bureaucratic, medical, or administrative protocols. The performance thus becomes a ritual of shared vulnerability, exposing the thin line between a system alert and a cry for help.
Towards a Minor Opera: Form Without Spectacle: Rejecting the grandeur of traditional opera, Opera One proposes a minor operatic form. It is an opera of the interface, the background process, the crash log. There is no narrative arc, no catharsis, no resolution, only the cyclical return of the loop (11’47”). This structure reinforces the work’s central paradox: it gives monumental attention to that which is designed to be ignored. In doing so, it challenges the hierarchies of aesthetic material, proposing that the most poignant expressions of contemporary life may be found not in curated emotion, but in the glitch, the buffer, the failed handshake between human and machine.
Conclusion
Opera One: Allegoric Vision for an Empty Artefact It is not a critique of technology but a phenomenology of its failure, a profound listening to the moments when systems stutter and reveal their inherent fragility. By translating error into opera, Paquete constructs a space where the cold logic of computation and the warm imprecision of the human voice meet in a shared condition of vulnerability. The work asks not what technology means, but how it feels when it breaks, and in that feeling, locates a fleeting, resonant form of connection.Keywords: #OperaOne #HugoPaquete #2009 #VideoInstallation #SingleChannelVideo #PostDigitalMedia #ComputationalError #ErrorMessages #TechnologicalFailure #MediaArchaeology #EmptyArtefact #OperaticForm #VoiceAsInterface #VocalPerformance #AlgorithmicLanguage #SemanticDisplacement #TechnologicalUnconscious #SystemInstability #PoeticsOfFailure #HumanMachineRelation #SoundAndVoiceArt #PortugueseMediaArt #LibrettoOfMalfunction #AllegoryOfFailure #BiopoliticalSonification #MinorOpera
Sub-Action.
Hugo Paquete, 2008
Sub-Action is a four-channel video installation that transposes Peter Handke’s Kaspar into a post-digital media ecology structured by fragmentation, recursion, and algorithmic command. Rather than adapting Handke’s theatrical narrative, the work reactivates its central operative mechanism: the formative violence of language as a system of control. Voice, text, and image are subjected to continuous processes of scanning, glitching, and real-time recombination, producing a technological theatre in which subjectivity is no longer represented but procedurally generated and destabilized. The visual figure, loosely derived from the electronically anonymized protagonist of George Lucas’s THX 1138, is not filmed but scanned, decomposed, and reassembled as data. This scanned body becomes the site where linguistic authority inscribes itself, not through dialogue or meaning, but through operational repetition. Off-screen voices issue disembodied, machinic instructions, while on-screen text bubbles proliferate, fragment, and collapse into a dense sonic field. Language is stripped of communicative intent and reduced to signal, rhythm, and pressure: a continuous drone of command.
Project Specifications
Title: Sub-Action
Artist: Hugo Paquete
Year: 2008
Format: Four-channel video installation
Media: Digital video, multi-channel projection, color, sound
Duration: 18′57″ (loop)
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Context: An early-career work developed and first presented at ESAD.CR (Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha). It prefigures the artist's core investigations into the technological unconscious and biopolitical sonification.
Critical Positioning
Sub-Action reframes Peter Handke’s Kaspar within a post-digital media paradigm, where subject formation is inseparable from technological systems. The central figure appears not as a psychological character but as a scanned, computational body shaped by corrupted visual data and algorithmic command. Language functions as an operational format rather than a communicative medium, emerging from distributed, non-human authority embedded in interfaces and protocols.
Through a four-channel configuration, the work rejects linear narration in favor of simultaneity, fragmentation, and real-time processing. Text and voice proliferate, glitch, and dissolve across multiple projections, producing a schizophrenic perceptual field in which language is experienced as excess and pressure rather than meaning. Sound operates as infrastructure: mechanized vocal commands and a dense semantic drone construct an environment of acoustic control, where signal overwhelms signification.
Visually, Sub-Action employs scanner aesthetics and glitch as critical methods, exposing the material and political conditions of digital representation. By translating theatrical interpellation into an immersive installation system, the work situates the viewer within a distributed control environment, where authority modulates perception rather than imposing fixed positions. The installation anticipates central concerns of later practice, foregrounding the sonic unconscious of technology, the aesthetics of failure, and the modulation of subjectivity within post-digital control societies.
Conclusion:
Sub-Action emerges as an early yet definitive articulation of Hugo Paquete's critical trajectory. Rather than illustrating Kaspar narratively, the work enacts its underlying logic within a post-digital condition, reframing language as code, subjectivity as data, and meaning as residual noise. Through its focus on scanning, glitch, and real-time processing, the installation exposes the linguistic unconscious embedded within digital systems. It anticipates key concerns that resonate throughout Paquete’s later practice: the aesthetics of failure, sound as an operational medium, and the modulation of perception within contemporary societies of control.
Keywords: #Sub-Action, #HugoPaquete, #2008, #FourChannelVideoInstallation, #PeterHandke, #Kaspar, #THX1138, #GlitchAesthetics, #ScannerArt, #PostDigitalMedia, #AlgorithmicLanguage, #SonicDrone, #Interpellation, #ControlSociety, #MediaArchaeology, #InstallationAsSystem, #PortugueseMediaArt, #TechnologicalInterpellation, #DigitalSubjectivity, #SemanticNoise