A journey through the multidisciplinary world of Oblinof

Oblinof is a multidisciplinary project, created by Maximiliano Koch (Artist, Musician and Multimedia Designer) that explores the interrelation between contemporary culture and the digital world, through different media and art practices. The project questions how technology has transformed our perception of identity, and reality itself, trying to understand how is shaping our way of perceiving both the external world and human internal one.

Since 2007 he started experimenting with electroacoustic music, creating noise and hardcore compositions. Over time the digital part became more relevant in his work, embracing a post-internet, transhumanism, cybershamanism imaginary.

He started experimenting with as many media as possible and formats such as video art, animation, 3d printing, virtual reality, livecoding, multimedia installations, augmented reality and audiovisual live sets.

Oblinof manages to fuse hard dance with experimental music, creating hybrid atmospheres typical of the deconstructed club.

We had a listen of his two last eps and made him some questions about his project.

Talking about your music, we can perceive a great variety of elements, from strident synthesisers and frenetic techno rhythms, to samples and textures, but there’s also the influence of Latin rhythms. What’s the objective of this mixture?

On one hand I want to continue exploring while producing music and on the other hand I want to promote body movement. By integrating sound experimentation with the energy of Latin American percussive rhythms compositions, you can create a listening experience that invokes both body movement and experimental research.

Also focusing on your graphic works there’s a great desire to experiment: the imaginary is postmodern, almost dystopian, but the landscapes have a paradisiacal and more spiritual atmosphere. What drove you to alternate elements so different from each other?

More than ten years have passed since I began to produce, so my graphic works reflect different stages of my life, in which the constant element has been the permanent change. I usually come back to the same concepts to underline a certain imaginary. I generally use tools that can cause me an aesthetic pleasure, from where I automatically generate different patterns, some of which may recur over time.

Do you usually make a track or its graphic equivalent first? Is there always a semantic correspondence between music and artworks?

Generally, music comes first, but you can always find correspondences between tracks and graphic works, because they are usually created in close times.

However, I don’t focus on correspondences, it’s more about making evident a certain meaning or representation of reality.

What do you want to transmit to your music users by creating sounds and images that mix the new hyper-technological reality with your Latin origins, the cybernetic world with the ancestral one?

There is no specific message, but rather a group of personal concerns that I channel through the conceptual union of the cyber world with numinous experiences. My interest in visual digital art born by noticing how well certain entheogenic experiences could be represented through music and art media. I think the two worlds apparently seem to have in common an etheric property, which is for me the sign of a metaphorical union. I also feel my life is strongly represented by it, since a huge part of my reality consists in the alternation between the cyber world and the internal world that connects us to our ancestral practices.

What is your relationship with augmented reality and how has it influenced your artistic project, not only graphically but also musically?

I have been working for a long time with artistic technological practices, and I find AI world quite interesting. However, I believe that we could extend the concept of “augmented reality” to almost any kind of action that can alter our perception. In fact, I believe during human evolution there’s always been the will to increase the perception of what we can consider real. I think experiences such as the AI vector one invite us to make deeper reflections about our way to see the world in general.

Do you think AI will help you in the dialogue between the new technological reality and the return to origins? And if so, do you think you can create a both artistic and musical project only developed in the AI world?

Yes totally, it offers a continuous opportunity of discussion.

I think all kind of technologies that have occurred gave us new clues to differently understand our existence.

Regarding the inclusion of AI tools in my work, I have been integrating them for a long time, especially visually and lately more musically; although I have still not developed a project exclusively using them, and I don't know if I'll do it since I'm more interested in hybrid projects, but I don't rule it out.

@oblinof_axyxa

Interview by @amaemi00101

RED•EYE WORLD