No Laughing Matter

Ruben Patiño & Kay Schuttel – 2020

"No Laughing Matter" @ CTM 2020. Photo by Kay Schuttel.

Under the title "No Laughing Matter," Patiño & Schuttel premiered a new spatial work at CTM 2020. Exploring laughter in relation to bodily presence and acousmatic sound, the piece studies laughing as a human gesture, as viral information that produces connectivity, and as material for psychological conditioning.

“No Laughing Matter” aims to create an ambiguous space between fun, joy, ridicule, anxiety, and fear, muddling the boundaries between human voice and synthetic sound, male and female, acoustic and amplified, imaginary and real, individual and collective. Together with a group of performers, Patiño & Schuttel use humour as a subversive tool with which to question rigidities and cultural excesses of “seriousness.”