"Slight of Air / Desaire" is a performance that turns breath, obstruction, and linguistic emergence into the core of a technologically mediated poetry recital. A custom-made muzzle encloses the performer’s face, isolating the mouth while a camera and focused light magnify this small territory, transforming every exhalation, strain, and fragment of sound into an intimate visual event. The poem is recited in Spanish, with English and Arabic subtitles that drift inward, gradually infiltrating a visual field made of breath, flesh, and algorithmic transformation.
The work begins with a striking gesture: the performer places the muzzle on themselves.
This act of self-enclosure becomes a metaphor for the paradoxes of contemporary life, in which
individuals adopt forms of self-limitation to endure external pressures. The muzzle protects and
restricts at once, turning the mouth into a site where autonomy and constraint collide.
What disappears physically becomes monumental digitally. The hidden mouth expands across the screen, revealed in overwhelming detail, and transformed into a landscape where language attempts to emerge. Air hits the lens, saliva flickers, and the usually invisible mechanics of utterance fill the image, producing a tension between exposure and obstruction.
As the camera pushes closer, eventually revealing itself as an endoscope, the anatomical passage dissolves into an abstract terrain of shifting textures, letters, and algorithmic distortions. Subtitles slowly migrate into this interior world, merging with its forms and questioning where text ends, and body begins.
Concept
“Slight of Air / Desaire” is a performance that turns breath, obstruction, and linguistic emergence into the core of a hybrid, technologically mediated recital. A custom-made muzzle encloses the performer’s face, isolating the mouth. A camera and focused light magnify this small space, transforming every exhalation, strain, and fragment of sound into an intimate visual event. The text is recited in Spanish, while English and Arabic subtitles drift from the margins toward the center of the image, infiltrating the interior world of breath, flesh, and digital transformation.
The performance begins with a deliberate, unsettling gesture: the performer places the muzzle on them-selves. This act of self-enclosure becomes a central metaphor, an embodied decision to accept a barrier that both protects and restricts. By choosing to constrain the mouth, the performer mirrors the paradox of contemporary life, in which people adopt forms of self-limitation to withstand external pressures. The muzzle becomes a dual symbol: a shield from an overwhelming world and a device that diminish-es expressive possibility. In this tension, the body reveals how protection becomes confinement, and how silence arises not only from oppression but also from strategies we internalize to navigate the world.
By concealing the mouth inside the muzzle, the performance seems to remove the instrument of speech, yet this disappearance produces the opposite effect: the mouth becomes impossibly magnified on the screen. What is hidden physically is revealed digitally in overwhelming detail, transforming a fragile, obstructed mouth into a monumental landscape where language attempts to emerge.
Early moments evoke a dental or medical examination. From within the semi-enclosed space, air hits the lens, saliva appears, and the mouth becomes an engine of expression. What is normally invisible fills the screen. This friction between exposure and obstruction creates constant tension: the performer struggles to speak while the apparatus constrains them, exposing the vulnerability of producing voice.
As the recitation begins, the text sounds muffled, breath becomes irregular, and discomfort is visible. The piece unfolds at the intersection of live recitation, real-time video transmission, and AI-generated processing. The body negotiates its presence with its digital double, creating a hybrid visual ecosystem where human and algorithm co-produce the image.
What begins as a simple camera pointed at a mouth reveals something more unsettling. The lens inches closer until the viewer realizes this is not an ordinary camera but an endoscope crossing the boundary from exterior to interior.
Subtitles slowly migrate into this interior world, merging with its forms and questioning where text ends, and body begins.
As it descends, the anatomical passage dissolves into an abstract landscape: folds shift like topogra-phies, letters emerge like organic growths, and algorithmic distortions ripple across the image. Lan-guage appears as a living material embedded in the body—vibrating, resisting, resurfacing.
The subtitles—Arabic and English—initially act as standard translations, but gradually detach, sliding into the illuminated interior, merging with textures, dissolving into flesh, and reappearing as fragments inside the AI imagery. Translation becomes spatial and corporeal, questioning where text ends and body begins.
Conceptually, “Slight of Air / Desaire” reflects on the fragility of breathing and its essential role in producing voice. Moments of choking or interruption highlight how easily this function can be dis-rupted. The audience becomes implicit participants in the respiratory cycle, the air entering the lungs and, transformed, exiting as poetry.
The work engages directly with ISEA 2026 themes such as Celestial Dialogues / Intercultural Dia-logue, Hybrid Realities, and Bodies, Identities & Agency. The multilingual voice forms a constellation reflecting how identity, place, and data intersect across cultures. Algorithmic manipulation suggests a “cosmic dialogue” between human presence and machinic interpretation.
Ultimately, “Slight of Air / Desaire” proposes a poetic encounter where voice becomes image, breath becomes data, and translation becomes a material force—reminding viewers that every word begins as air struggling to become meaning.
Technical Requirements
A podium for the PC, and an HDMI cable to a screen or projector.
The system runs locally on the PC and interfaces with custom hardware containing a microphone, camera, and dedicated lighting, enabling real-time interaction and AI-driven video generation.
Duration: between 10 and 15 minutes
 |
José Aburto (joseAZ)
is an experimental poet, professor, cultural promoter, and communications professional whose work examines how digital media reshapes poetic expression. His projects have been presented in more than 25 exhibitions across over 10 countries, included in 5 international electronic literature archives, and reviewed in more than 50 academic and press publications.
He has exhibited in Chile, China, the United States, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, Bolivia, Canada, Norway, and Peru. His works appear in the Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature 2021 and the ELO Collections (2016, 2021). He received the Adobe National Poetry Award (1999) and the Fulbright AIG Scholarship (2002).
In 2025, he presented “Poetry is an Invasion,” a 25-year retrospective, across 3 locations, reaching 10,000 visitors. His 2023 TEDxBarriosAltos talk reflected on poetry as a transformative force.
He teaches creative technology in many universities in Peru and holds an MA in Interactive Media Arts from NYU.
