Pinoy artists explore the interface between art and artifice

“I really don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, I have an idea of what I want to happen, but I don’t know exactly how it would look like, or if it’ll work. Many things could go wrong. And that’s okay,” award-winning film scorer, journalist and longtime WSK (pronounced as wasak) collaborator Erwin Romulo replied when asked how he feels about possible tech failures that might occur while exhibiting their interactive sound installations for Art Fair Philippines 2017.

“The fun lies in the risks and uncertainty. Isn’t that the point?” Romulo quipped.

Commissioned by Art Fair Philippines for a special show, WSK focuses on the creative process itself, rather than the output: the artists over art.

Echoing Roberto Chabet, WSK prizes ideation over the formal components of works. A “living lab,” the group is a powerful mix of interdisciplinary artists united by their passion for machines, art, and dissonance. It’s an amalgam of instincts and tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive art venture.

“WSK means many things, but it primarily means constantly destroying or deconstructing yourself and the status quo. The art could either be a re-creation of these, or the destruction itself,” Tengal Drilon explained.

An independent sound art collective with the experimental spirit of José Maceda and the digital age, WSK has been disrupting mainstream practices in composition and performance for eight years, and has been holding an annual festival with the same name. They’re popular for making their own instruments out of everyday objects and junk that often spawns a wonderful mess of trashy, organic and steampunk weapons of noise in the tradition of Lirio Salvador but with heavy electronics, visuals and sometimes, elements of wood and nature.

Fluid, critical and playful, the ensemble has accidentally grown into a band of makers, welcoming inputs from experts in various disciplines outside art. Phil Robotics is actually helping them out for their upcoming exhibition at the sixth floor of The Link Carpark this arts month.

But more than a self-taught tech-arts guerilla collective, WSK is an attitude—it’s a movement. With planned interactive sound installations at the car park’s elevator and other non-traditional tricks up their sleeve, WSK is prodding people to re-think what art should be. 

“It’s not only the focus on the process that makes us different. The medium of WSK—sound—is subversive in itself. It’s rebelling from the art scene that thinks of “Fine Arts” as visual alone. Unlike paintings, sound is not supposed to be gazed upon to be appreciated. You have to listen to it. It’s experiential, punk and transient. It’s not supposed to be bought or collected,” multilingual poet and WSK festival manager Franchesca Casauay asserted.

So why is WSK participating in a blatantly commercial and mainstream affair?

“We've been doing this for eight years and we know that there's no market for it. We have a very low budget and we’re still doing everything, DIY. Or as Tengal beautifully puts it, DIWO—Do It With Others. We’re here to have fun because we love doing this. We’ll do this ANYWHERE. In fact, if we could do the Robot Relay at Eat Bulaga, why not? It doesn't matter," Romulo stressed.

The art world’s version of a hackathon, WSK originally wanted to focus on doing “Robot Relay” for Art Fair, which is a performance where machines and musicians play side by side with each other to churn out a symphony of grunge, chimes and glitches. 

“WSK is about openness and collaboration. For Art Fair, we created a lab for free flowing ideas to combine and combust. Initially, we wanted to do a revival of ‘Robot Relay,’ which we did in 2015. It was a performance,” Drilon said.

“But our idea evolved through constant brainstorming, making and co-making. The result of the workshop will be our final discovery. That’s what people are going to see in the exhibit,” Drilon added.

Advocating the harmony between humans and machines, WSK’s special exhibition for Art Fair is inspired by and named after Richard Brautigan’s poem about how lovely would it be if technology and nature are in concord: “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”

“People, especially the children gets easily bored in art shows. I want to change that. Sure, you can intellectualize this exhibit. But what I want is for people to be curious about the machines, about the lab, about new media and sound art, which has been here in the country for a long time. I want people to interact with what WSK have created and ask questions like, ‘How does this work?’” he said.

This is the primary theme of the group’s exhibit, but in the middle of the two-month workshop, it evolved, as they found a sex tape that all the members used as the material for all the works.

Romulo has been looking for this elusive tape for three years, even when he was still the editor-in-chief of Esquire. It’s serendipitous that WSK is all about sound, and they found the tape at a moment in history that people needs to hear it most. — TJD, GMA News

“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” is a special exhibition for Art Fair by WSK sound art collective. It will be on display on the sixth floor and the elevator leading thereto at The Link Carpark, Ayala Center, Makati City from February 16 to 19.