Archivo Auxiliar: Cyberstreams

Archivo Auxiliar (AAUX) is a collective documenting the history of electronic music and its social production within Mexico City. 

As nightlife venues were shut in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, digital events arose to take the place of parties and clubs in the global electronic music scene. In January, 2021, AAUX embarked on “Cyberstreams,” a project to document these online events as part of the “For the Record” residency sponsored by the Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

In Mexico City, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, raves and related places of gathering played an important role in producing safe and inclusive spaces, inviting people across lines of race, class and sexuality. Nightlife was a place for personal expression where producers and performers curated the experience. Locations were chosen for both technical values like acoustics and the atmosphere they would impart on events. Performers enraptured audiences, with bodies flowing and moving as a mass under precise fabricated circumstances. At the core of these events was a collective and shared experience, creating bonds between strangers.

During the pandemic, formerly tactile and collective experiences became livestreams and VR events, bounded by the frames of screens and cameras but creating new arenas for design, identity presentation, and consumption. “Cyberstreams” studied the spatial, social and sound production in these streaming events.

The project combined research, interviews and case studies, organized into four categories: Identity and Socialization, Rave Culture, Sound and Space and Digital Culture. We collected recordings of events and streams for our archive, and conducted interviews, via Zoom, with party promoters, DJs, developers, radio station hosts, artists, and more. The interviews, like the events themselves, span time zones and geographic locations, digital platforms folding and compressing the physical world. 

Moving between facsimile and fantasy, between static and interactive events, online events changed the electronic music scene. The individuals we interviewed, beyond trying to replicate the experience of a rave in a dirty warehouse, created fantasy dream-like worlds that attendants never expected, Cyberstreams opens a window into that virtual universe that was unfolding before our very eyes.

Exhibition
Cyberstreams took shape as a video-based installation, occupying the library and gallery spaces of Proyector Gallery in Mexico City. Exhibition spaces were darkened using large black curtains. In the smaller library space, suffused with artificial smoke and ambient green light, the projection presented a 30-minute video essay outlining the project, including clips from the interviews. 

In the larger gallery, an atmospheric installation of sound, light and video turned the space into a thickened screen, simulating the act of watching without physical access. The video installation, a montage of videos taken from online events, was scored with a frenetic tracklist evoking the distraction of digital media. The installation could be inhabited from within or watched from the courtyard through a wall of framed windows, mimicking the voyeuristic experience of digital streams and the nostalgia for community.

The opening event took place on July 3, 2021. Invited guests performed at a DJ booth placed in the courtyard, with the installation as a backdrop visible through the window wall.

Proyector
Proyector is a curatorial platform based in Mexico City, dedicated to promoting emerging voices in contemporary architectural research. Proyector is committed to fostering new strategies and critical, theoretical and historical tools on spatial issues.

Archivo Auxiliar
Gabo Barranco
Ayesha S Ghosh
Ramon Jaramillo
Frankie Ventura
Alicja Wozniak

Video Production
Rafael Villaseñor Vázquez

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for support in developing the project.

Special thanks to Katia Truijen, Marina Otero Verzier, Johan Oomen, Delany Boutkan, and Erick Fowler.

We are indebted to those who gave their time to be interviewed for the project,
Johannes Auvinen, Miguel Senquiz (Raveblocks)
Anna Brower, Allen Feldman (Spirit Twin)
Malititzin Cortez (CNDSD)
Saskia Gebert, Tania Correa (WET)
Seva Granik (Unter)
Lucas Gutierrez (CTM)
Arielle Karpowicz (IMVU)
Patrick Marsman (Pinkman)
Tania Milan (Arieshandmodel)
Francisco Outon (Tatanka)
Luis Antonio Tovar Salas (LATS)

Performer list:
DJ Unfollow b2b DJ free spirit (ambient set)
Space Cadet
Arieshandmodel