Movement, memory, and sound

It’s only been about five months since Mexico City multimedia artist and musician Francisco Eme moved to San Diego, but he’s already integrated his work into multiple shows in California and Baja. Many of the constantly traveling Eme’s audiovisual installations focus on themes of mobility, the road, and urbanization.

His works Apparent Movement and Transient Memory were shown in the San Diego Art Institute’s winter exhibition, the former creating visual textures from lines on the highway and the latter following his travels throughout Mexico with dots projected on a map made of headphone cables. The attached headphones played music that Eme listened to along each route.

Currently, SDAI is showing Architectural Voice, a multimedia composition for video and 5.1 audio that combines images from the Balboa Park’s original 1914 blueprints with field recording from the past several months as the park approaches its centennial.

“One interesting characteristics of these recordings is their multicultural and multilanguage content,” Eme says. “Sonically speaking, the piece has no defined language. In a similar way, Balboa Park´s architecture is full of references to Spanish-Mexican construction.”

Meanwhile, Eme’s City Run installation can be seen at 1250 art and music space in Tijuana. The project uses GPS-mapped routes to demonstrate the daily commute of Eme and five friends throughout Mexico City. The color-coded routes, like Transient Memory, follow speaker cables along the projection surface while accelerated audio recorded along each route issues from the speakers.

Eme will be following City Run with a Tijuana/San Diego rendition called Planos Paralelos to open at 1250 in March. In the meantime, you can catch his sonic experiments at Stay Strange Slow Death Noise Music Festival on February 21 at Space 4 Art.