Perez Infante


Professional Make-Doer

Mark

BICHO: Prosthetic Hearing Device for Enhanced Spatial Exploration

Performatic/ve Device
June 2019

Montreal

BICHO is a prosthetic hearing device for enhanced spatial exploration, a wearable artifact that seeks to “question the surface of a visual world”i by expanding our aural perception. The artifact allows us to discover the unapparent frequencies, sounds and signals that surround us, and to interact with them as me move in space.
BICHO is an analytical and a musical instrument, as it involves creative audio production and spatial exploration. As we move, “hidden frequencies“ can be discovered and manipulated.

Beyond its musical possibilities, BICHO addresses the affective and political aspects of sound.

Sound connects us with the exterior world, and strongly impacts our relations with human and more-than-human entities, and with the environment. By prompting an augmented physical experience of site, this artifact allows us to actively intervene in the production of space, as co-habitants within this augmented soundscape. In this way, this project seeks to highlight and engage with the realm of the affects in/of sound.

In parallel, Bicho inquires about sound and other waves as a fundamental elements in the shaping and reshaping of social space. From their invisible domains, audible and inaudible frequencies – more or less subtle forms of information–, are constantly sharing (or disputing) the territory with us, maybe eliciting some worlds and denying others.



i Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, 2014