Artist statement

I would like to question our approach to artistic expression in the mass-market era, our capacity to perceive and interpret the world and the self, and our subsequent consciousness and freedom. I dream about and work for a way of creation, interpretation, and reception of art within an environment free of market domination, academic technocracy. and administrative deception.

My work as an artist is focused on the problematization and denormalization of productivity as the main socio-temporal logic of our time (do more, do faster, do better). I do this mostly through sound: I intend to create situations of sonic "underload" where the listener can linger over reflection and contemplation. I believe in quietness, sparseness, and simplicity to overcome the excess of information, fragmentation of the present, and immediacy of production, consumption, and optimization of today's everyday life. I train myself to look better in order to see, to listen better in order to hear (Éliane Radigue, "The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal"): The biggest step of my journey as an artist was to become conscious that I am not conscious, and to strive for being conscious.

I intend to understand and exist in the present through artistic creation, focusing on finding a solid ground, presence, and intention for my creative necessities. I hope to create opportunities to encounter continuity, depth, and meaning in this hectic world for me and others.

...Promoting resting as a social action. We shouldn't rest to become blind and deaf, but to ease the opening of eyes and ears amid the culture of the overload and systematic growth of today's reality... ...If anybody is sleepy, let them go to sleep...

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre for Nausea, John Kennedy Toole for A Confederacy of Dunces, John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath, and José Luis Sampedro for El río que nos lleva.

Thanks to Galina Ustvolskaya, the truest composer, and to Éliane Radigue, Eva-Maria Houben, and Jakob Ullmann for defying the immediacy era.

Thanks to Dada (dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza). Thanks to Fluxus. Thanks to what is meaningless, useless, and empty according to the mass-market society.

And thanks to all artists yet to be discovered, lost in the ocean of information, that will guide and inspire my work at some point. I am constantly searching for you.

This open-source website has been kindly designed and developed by Giang Tran 😎. Still a work in progress!

Hi!

My name is Pilar Miralles and I was born in Almería (Spain) in 1997. I am a composer and sound artist currently based in Helsinki (Finland). I completed my Master's Degrees in Electroacoustic Composition and Composition in Madrid and Helsinki, respectively, and now I am a doctoral candidate in the Arts Study Programme of DocMus Doctoral School, at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. My artistic research project is titled Nothing Much; Denormalizing Productivity through Sonic Underload. My objective is to investigate and question, through an underloaded compositional practice, the normalization of a culture of the overload, whose main consequence is the lack of space for a reflexive construction of the self.

My work as a composer has been supported by Teosto, MES, and Pro Musica Säätiö.

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