Leticia Pérez y Izaskun Etxebarria

Gonzalo Biffarella, musician and composer, is professor at the National University of Córdoba (Argentina), and one of Argentina's most renowned specialists in electro-acoustic music. His multidisciplinary focus is evident in multimedia and digital art productions, on which he collaborates with performers, video artists, dancers, etc.

LETICIA PÉREZ/IZASKUN ETXEBARRIA: Given that your education focused on music, how did you come to connect visual and plastic arts with theater arts?

GONZALO BIFFARELLA : I've been working for several years in the area of electro-acoustic music, through which I discovered digital art. The idea of sound's physicality really interested me; the possibility of working with materials. Just as scientists have explored matter, we can penetrate sound thanks to digital techniques.
I discovered the world of sound and I realized that, beyond abstract electro-acoustic music, there was another major role that sound plays in our society. I'm referring to its semantic aspect, to the contents related to the everyday world, with social and political questions. I had the luck to win an award from WDR 3 radio in Cologne (Germany) and to be able to work with Klaus Schöning, who had produced Mauricio Kagel and John Cage . That opened my mind in a big way. He insisted that artists go beyond what they think they can do. My interest in images and visual matter encouraged me to experiment with electronic media. In general, I try to use the same procedures that I apply to sound, as much for what I call “micro-operations,” that is, sculpting small sounds, as for working with images and “macro-operation” procedures, and finally, for linking them. It's what I call a “network of configurable objects.”