Nicolás Kisic Aguirre

Lives and works in South Bend, IN

Artist statement

I create machines that explore and illuminate the social and political nature of sound in public space. My artistic and creative research is practice-based and transdisciplinary. With a background in architecture and a lifelong fascination with machines, I design and build sound instruments and robots that examine the relationships among space, power, technology, and sound. My ideas and concepts materialize into artifacts that serve as vehicles for conducting experimental research, a practice of continuous prototyping. My critical and aesthetic practice is open-source, collaborative, and highly engaged with the public. I have organized my research within three contextual frameworks. Instruments of Protest investigates how sound machines and DIY strategies can amplify voices typically excluded from public space. Radio Parazit (Parasite Radio) explores how colonial dynamics mirror parasitic relationships in which the host and parasite trade places. Disobedient Robots / Desobediencia Robótica is a bilingual research platform asking how we might build robotic technologies that resist rather than reinforce existing power structures, grounded in Latin American approaches to knowledge and making. Across all three, I keep asking how we listen and whose voices are heard, and how technology might serve futures different from those it is typically designed for.

Artwork