24/7

24/7 – A new artwork by Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, 2022 artist in residence at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden

Esmeralda Conde Ruiz (b. 1980/Spain, lives in London) is an internationally renowned composer and artist. Through a multimedia art practice that spans sound, performance, moving image and AI, Conde Ruiz examines human voices and their sonic environments. She investigates the idea of multiculturalism and how human memory is solidified by sonic experiences and her work questions how we as humans are shaped by the need to connect and communicate. 

From April to October 2022, Conde Ruiz was the artist in residence at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden. The Lab is a platform for future-oriented dialogue between science, art and society at Technische Universität Dresden (TUD). The artist in residence program supports artistic research and offers international artists the opportunity to engage with Dresden’s academic community and to work with young academics at the Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden, a graduate school for the humanities and social sciences, and other researchers at the university on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and societal change. 

During Conde Ruiz’s residency she conducted artistic research and reflected upon digital infrastructures, the ecological impact of the server farm industry and the relationship between humans, technology and AI. Her current body of research draws attention to the invisible and barely tangible world of our digital data and the virulent future technologies, highlighting the role and influence of humans in this constantly changing world. Her new artwork titled 24/7 questions the continuous cycle of our human data and the technological space it occupies. It draws on the human need to communicate via human voice whilst also highlighting the new sounds created when we communicate digitally with each other. How do these sounds differ sonically and in what ways are they similar? What are the costs of digital communication? 24/7 portrays the co-creation between humans and technology and how true symbiosis might sound in the future. If technology is trying to sound human, what happens if humans attempt to mimic the sound of technology?

Esmeralda Conde Ruiz is a Spanish award-winning interdisciplinary composer and artist who lives and works in London. Her site specific compositions evolve from a visual starting point and develop into sound landscapes with rhythmic patterns. In her often multilingual compositions she interacts with light and dark, colour, staged elements and moving image. She explores the boundaries of choral composition, which she transforms musically and visually, decoding them and transposing them into new contexts. 

Conde Ruiz has worked with choirs from Ecuador to New York, to Syria and Sydney. Her experience ranges from creating and directing the 500 amateur choir who performed at the 2016 opening of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London to writing a composition for 350 child singers from 7 different countries in multiple languages for Dresdner Philharmonie.

In 2020 Conde Ruiz founded the “E Ensemble”, an online ensemble of singers from all over the world. Together with the ensemble, she is exploring ways to compose music specifically for performing online in the digital space and exploring the sonic qualities of technology and voice.