Rubén Patiño and Kay Schuttel are interdisciplinary artists working across sound and performance. At CTM 2020, the pair premiere their new work “No Laughing Matter,” which explores laughing in relation to bodily presence and acousmatic sound. As laughter is seen as a uniquely human gesture, the sound of laughter is employed as compositional material for psychological conditioning in their performance
Originated as a re-interpretation of the “laugh track”, a sound effect featured prominently in TV sitcoms, the project tries to explore the synergy between the enjoyable and the uncanny. No Laughing Matter aims to create a transitional space in between fun and fear that muddles the boundaries of human voice versus synthetic sound, male and female acoustic and amplified, imaginary and real. Using humor as a subversive tool questions certain rigid standards and a persistent excess of "seriousness" in contemporary electronic music.
Rubén Patiño works in the fields of electronic music and visuals. He focuses on the sculptural properties of synthetic sound while exploring the limits of concerts, public events, and installations. In particular, Patiño works within the field of sound synthesis while exploring the audio-visual creative potential of programming environments and algorithmic composition. All of his work tends to contain different strategies regarding space and presentation formats, while combining sound, lights, text, image, or found materials. He has published works with several labels such as Anòmia, Free Software Series, Alku, and has upcoming records on Ge-Stell and Hypermedium.
Kay Schuttel’s practice explores the performativity of daily gestures, the evolution of corporeal vocabularies, and the intersection between choreography and visual art. Intrigued by social codes and unwritten rules embedded in everyday live behaviour, Schuttel explores the performative aspects of the habitual. Her focus is on the formation of new bodily movements and language generated by the evolution of communication tools, recording devices, and mediated daily rituals. Through abstracting and reassembling key components from this behaviour, her work stages moments in which these abstracted components are performed in altered forms or different contexts.