Juan Manuel Escalante, "Neutral Friend, Unknown Enemy"
From Steve Luber
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From Steve Luber
Performed by Juan Manuel Escalante
11/12/2022
Myers Studio, Connecticut College
In 1986 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) released the APP-6(C) standard. Throughout its 558-pages, the document presents a military notational system featuring acronyms, symbols, and arrangement principles. "Neutral Friend, Unknown Enemy" is a software-art piece that builds generative cartographies based on the APP-6 system. Several confrontational scenarios create a speculative audiovisual composition.
All sounds were generated using a modular synthesizer setup and field recordings. The composition's macrostructure appears intermittently in the form of a graphic score.
Juan Manuel Escalante is a designer and an artist working with computer code, modular synthesizers, and analog drawings. His work has been shown in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Peru, South Korea, Mexico, and featured in major festivals and exhibitions, such as OFFF, Mutek, Currents New Media, Binario, Ars Electronica, Ceremonia, amongst others. He is a member of the National System of Art Creators (National Endowment for the Arts, MX) and received the Corwin Award (1st prize) for Electronic-Acoustic Composition in 2016.He has taught creative programming at the University of California Santa Barbara, and at various higher education institutions in Mexico, including the graduate program in Architecture (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM), where he founded and directed its Media Lab for eight years. He holds a BArch (Autonomous Metropolitan University, MX), an MFA in Architecture (UNAM), and a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Technology (University of California, Santa Barbara).