Dissemination

Hugo Paquete releases three albums expanding the boundaries of post-digital listening and contemporary sound composition

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The composer and CIAC researcher Hugo Paquete unveiled three digital albums in July 2025 — YUGEN, No Body Lives Here (ODO), and COSMOS — which consolidate his artistic and academic trajectory at the forefront of experimental music, post-digital aesthetics, and transdisciplinary research in art, science, and technology. These works emerge from international collaborations, performative contexts, and investigations developed as part of his PhD in Digital Media Arts, creating a sonic landscape that traverses the body, machine, space, and cosmos.

YUGEN: Sound as Post-Human Dramaturgy

The result of a performance presented on January 13, 2024, at Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf, YUGEN is an autonomous sound work developed within the European project MODINA – Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience. Collaborating with choreographer Christine Bonansea Saulut and media artist Chris Ziegler, the album explores the artistic relationship between body, technology, and mediation. It employs technologies such as motion capture, virtual reality avatars, and machine listening algorithms to probe circuits between physical presence and digital abstraction.

Composed using a post-techno methodology, the album breaks with traditional stylistic categories and offers a speculative and critical listening experience. Each track functions as a sonic prosthesis, intertwining human gestures and algorithmic agency, outlining an immersive dramaturgy of the post-human sensorium.

No Body Lives Here (ODO): Generative Sonic Ecosystem

Released on July 22, 2025, No Body Lives Here (ODO) presents a radically distributed sound architecture, born from an immersive performance premiered at ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe in 2020. The work explores sound as living matter and sensitive topology, shaped by audience movement and a non-linear listening system supported by artificial intelligence, granular synthesis, field recordings, and interaction via mobile devices.

Inspired by Actor-Network Theory, ODO dissolves boundaries between human and machine, proposing an expanded post-techno aesthetic where composition becomes an ecosystem. Now available in digital format, the piece translates an experience originally designed for 48 speakers into the virtual space, revealing a territory in constant transformation.

COSMOS: Listening Between Science, Art, and Astrophysics

Closing the cycle, the album COSMOS, released on July 30, 2025, proposes a cosmological listening experience where art, science, and technology converge. Initially developed as a performance at ZKM in 2018, the project investigates sound as a speculative and generative system, anchored in astrophysical data, algorithms, and spatialized sound design.

With compositions such as Unevenness — “sent into space aboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission” — and other pieces based on the sonification of satellite orbits, COSMOS presents sound as gravitational force and spectral matter. Through drones, noise, and microsounds, Paquete proposes an aesthetic that transforms scientific data into sensory landscapes and cosmological gestures.

With these three releases, Hugo Paquete establishes himself as a central figure in contemporary artistic research, merging sound composition, interactive technology, and speculative thought into a practice where sound becomes medium, matter, and language to explore the territories of the body, the network, and the universe.

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