Lexicon
One asterisk (*): a term used with its recognizable, universally established meaning.
Two asterisks (**): an existing term substantially redefined by Carlos Sandoval Mendoza.
Three asterisks (***): a term and definition coined entirely by Carlos Sandoval Mendoza.
ACOUSTIC ANATOMY
(***) Sound assigned to specific zones of the body, as if the body itself were a mapped instrument.
AI ARCHAEOLOGY
(***) Using obsolete, early-generation AI apps as artistic material — treating outdated generative technology itself as an archaeological artifact of a previous era.
ANALOGUE SIMULATION
(**) Digital content that imitates the texture or appearance of the analogue without ever crossing into physical form.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
(*) Machines receiving human properties, objects holding a soul.
The Birth of a Ship · Petenera
ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE
(**) Anthropological complexity is subjected to a process that turns it into an interlocked, systemic phenomenon.
ANTI-PERFORMANCE SCORE
(***) Conceptual performance instructions with no real stage or virtual-representation consequences.
ANTI-MORPHOSIS
(***) A generative process deliberately halted, frozen before reaching its destination. Structural opposite of Palindromic Metamorphosis Loop.
ANTILEGO
(***) A method to form a discourse from theoretically opposite, non-coincident elements, opposing the idea of LEGO, the kids game, where all tokens are made to match. Includes Denied Convergence.
ART AND TOYS
(***) Folk toys — plastic and wood kid puppets, carousel toys, ping-pong balls — played as instruments, not props.
ARTUMENT
(***) A work of art as a pure rhetorical, philosophical, discursive, or ontological argument, instead of a sublimating, artistic, poetic expression.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
(**) Childhood remembrances and social experiences used directly as compositional material.
Fatalismo Mágico · The Mexican National Anthem · Mex Toys · La Pasión Según la Gente
CARTESIAN DUALISM
(*) A being defined on dichotomous principles.
Hidden 2 · El Instrumento · Antilegos · Máquina Latina · Die Tränen der Dinge
CHILDHOOD RESIDUE
(*) Childhood memories and memory-disrupted self-image, used as direct compositional, conceptual, visual, or discursive material.
The Mexican National Anthem · Hidden 2 · El Instrumento · Post-COVID Series
CHRONOTOPE
(*) Bakhtin: the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.
Fatalismo Mágico · Viertel nach Schatten · La Pasión Según la Gente · The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery
CHRONOTOPIC INVERSION
(**) A real chronotope that the artist generates, intervenes on, or restages, and which then disguises itself as neutral, traditional, or spontaneous to the perceiver, hiding the authorship of what was actually constructed.
Viertel nach Schatten · La Pasión Según la Gente · Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas
COLLECTIVE COHERENCE
(**) A complex synchronization process, based on sonic, gestural, and encoded information, through which a group of performers becomes synchronized.
The Mexican National Anthem · Biberdam-Assut · Die Basta Zeiten sind Vorbei · Qu Trompa · Qu Vara · Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas · Antilegos · Máquina Latina
COMPOUND INCOHERENCE
(**) People, proud of a faith that colonization imposed on them, practice a chaotic, mixed form of a primarily sober, serious ritual. The incoherence between form and origin coexists with the pride and the faith.
COMPOUND OF ERRORS
(**) Nested, Matryoshka-style layers of human inaccuracy, each one generating a more developed level of inaccuracy.
CONVERGENCE-DIVERGENCE
(***/**) AI sense: a converged process interrupted and re-defined by divergent human gestures. Dying/accompaniment sense: accompanying another person's dying closely enough.
Post-COVID Series · Ursula, the Art of Dying
CULTURAL AUTOMATION AND HOPE
(**) Automated, romanticized ideas of identity and resistance confronted directly, alongside real manifestations of resistance and hope.
COLONIALISM
(*) A civilization fragmented and prevented from forming continuity on its own terms.
DEEP CULTURE
(*) Edward T. Hall: the internal, largely unconscious part of a culture — the beliefs, values, and unwritten rules that shape behavior beneath the visible surface of customs and traditions.
The Mexican National Anthem · Viertel nach Schatten · Fatalismo Mágico · La Pasión Según la Gente
DENIED CONVERGENCE
(***) The voluntary combination of discursive elements or differentiated cognitive identities to generate prevalent incoherences. Coherence is thus continuously interrupted or denied.
DEVOURING FOREST
(***) The forest as an active subject rather than a passive backdrop: it reclaims what is left inside it, digesting objects and bodies until they become indistinguishable from itself.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY MEDIATION
(*) A work whose final realization cannot exist without digital technology mediating between its analogue and digital components.
Hidden 2 · Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas · Hearing in Bed · Antilegos · Máquina Latina · Die Schaukel
DOG VISIONS
(***) All that a dog senses that we cannot sense.
EMOTIONAL PORNOGRAPHY
(**) The tensions, private and shifting emotions, and imbalance of human relations are exposed raw.
Mex Toys · El Instrumento · Die Tränen der Dinge
FAKE ARCHAEOLOGY
(**) An imagined archaeological excavation, pursuing specific pre-defined results, using a real, paradigmatic object, as an absolute reference.
The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery · Leporinas
FAKE ONTOLOGY
(**) Potential myths with no real origin, conjured out of nothing, yet carrying the same narrative weight as myths with real lineage.
The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery · Leporinas
FALSE WATER CYCLE
(**) Vapor condensation dropped out from brass instruments, arbitrarily considered as a \u201cwater cycle,\u201d using a collecting bucket to reinsert that water into the instruments.
FICTION-NON FICTION
(*) The unresolved threshold between staged performance and documentary footage.
Fatalismo Mágico · The Mexican National Anthem · Viertel nach Schatten · Mex Toys · La Pasión Según la Gente
FORCED MIGRATION
(*) Bodies moved by forces they did not author.
Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas
FUNCTION LANDSCAPE
(**) The landscape becomes an active dramaturgical character, not a backdrop, not an actor.
Fatalismo Mágico · La Pasión Según la Gente · Der Wald · The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery
FUNCTION PERMUTATION
(***) A process in which the original function of a being or an object is substituted by another, non-pertaining function.
GAN-BASED PROJECTIONS
(**) An AI portrait system collapsing noise into an image through a single generative pass, not iterative denoising.
GEOMETRIC LEGACY
(***) An early-AI-based narrative technique documenting an entire generative arc, iteration by iteration, to full recognizable convergence. Mother-cell for future narrative series.
INTERACTIONS
How coherence, abstraction, behavior and organization emerge through interaction rather than centralized control.
INTERLOCKING COLLABORATION
(**) A hocket-based decodified reference, where the final, perceived result can exist only across active performers — no one holds the whole result alone.
INTERRUPTED IMPROVISATION PATTERNS
(**) Interrupted full improvised sonic or acoustic discourse, with limited-length specific written or codified instructions.
ISOLATED COHERENCE
(***) The contrary of Collective Coherence. Performers read the same coded instructions alone, only to realize later that they were taking part in a collective coherence.
Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas · Hearing in Bed · Antilegos · Máquina Latina · Die Tränen der Dinge
LINEAR OR NON-LINEAR FLOOR MATS AS SOUND TRIGGERS
(***) Diverse cardboard coded mats on the floor, to be foot-activated by the conductor-composer and followed by the performers.
MECHANIC TREMOR
(***) An imperfect or old machine trembles. That tremor is perceived as human vulnerability.
NETWORK OF TREES
(**) Acentric coordination — local signals producing a global result with no conductor.
Trees with Sensors · Mycelia · Die Schaukel
NETWORKED ECOLOGY
(**) Trees sharing live movement data across distant locations — a distributed forest across continents.
NOCTURNAL INK-DRAWINGS
(***) Drawings made at night, recording what's sensed rather than seen.
OBJECT AGENCY
(***) Machines depicting human capacities. Objects holding a pretended soul.
The Birth of a Ship · Petenera · Trees with Sensors
OBSERVATION AS SYNAPSE
(***) A life-long tic of a compulsive observation of \u201cirrelevant\u201d or hidden beings, locations or moments as synaptic triggers, instead of ideas.
Fatalismo Mágico · Viertel nach Schatten · Sinus-Köpek
OCTOPUS CONDUCTOR
(**) A conductor dividing his body into different, sometimes independent, non-homophonic functions — hands, feet, a score, even musical instruments, acoustic or electronic — the way an octopus distributes thought across its arms rather than a single center.
Die Basta Zeiten sind Vorbei · Mosaicos
PALINDROMIC METAMORPHOSIS LOOP
(**) A repeated, bidirectional, linear transformation consisting of a predictable, zig-zag in nature, repeated origin-destiny-origin process.
PERCEIVED ECOLOGY
(**) Perceived ecological cycle, even if it is just a simulation of it.
PERCEIVED FOREST
(***) A forest that exists only once a conscious being enters it: not as an ecosystem, but the forest as filtered through fear, memory, or myth.
Tent Visions · Mycelia · The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery
PERFORMANCE IN VIDEO-ISOLATION
(***) A display depicted as a container, compressing expression as an isolated artistic output. Works well as a creative claustrophobic stage.
Hearing in Bed · Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas · Antilegos · Máquina Latina · Die Tränen der Dinge
PERFORMED VULNERABILITY
(*) Fragile, gentle, loving and unexpected relationships between instruments, performers, and embedded histories.
Petenera · El Instrumento · The Body of Ligia
PROMPTER SCORE
(*) A portable, coded information teleprompter, feeding performers with specific instructions, as they migrate or displace.
Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas
PROSTHETIC ADD-ON
(***) A human-body, form-related instrument, worn on the body part it extends, that adds or enhances its capabilities via digitalization of analogue or organic information.
QUANTIZED MASS
(**) The mass as a complex system is subjected to a regularization mechanism that allows its complexity to be perceived in bits or melodies, within an acoustic turbulence.
RANDOM-BASED ACOUSTIC FIELD
(*) Sounds are triggered by physical data, as in sonification. Still, the final pickup files used are selected at random, contradicting the basic principles of sonification's transduction processes.
Mosaicos · Steim: Gloves with Sensors · El Instrumento · The Body of Ligia · Trees with Sensors · Interaktion Festival
RUBIK'S ANTHROPOLOGY
(***) Arbitrary permutation of diverse archaeological fragments to form seemingly coherent shapes, violating archaeological, historical, or scientific principles.
RANDOMIZED SOUND-BANKS
(***) A fixed bank of discrete sonic elements — performers, sound files, sensors — subjected to a random selection to generate a sequence of unpredictable outputs. Complementary to Random-Based Acoustic Field.
Mosaicos · Steim: Gloves with Sensors · El Instrumento · The Body of Ligia · Interaktion Festival
SIMULTANEOUS EXISTENCES
(*) Inhabiting more than one state of being — machine and living thing — without resolving into either.
The Birth of a Ship · Petenera · Mandarino Marioneta · Huge Mobiles · Sinus-Köpek · The Body of Ligia · Monas Series · Teleprompter / Nubes y Nómadas · Antilegos · Máquina Latina · Trees with Sensors
SOCIAL PROOF
(*) The psychological and social phenomenon in which people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior in a given situation, and adjust their own behavior to conform.
Fatalismo Mágico · The Mexican National Anthem · Viertel nach Schatten · Mex Toys · La Pasión Según la Gente · Interaktion Festival
SONIFICATION
(*) The technique of translating data into sound, using non-speech audio to convey information or make data sonically perceptible.
SOUNDSCAPE FOR THE DEAF
(**) Every sound and dialogue in a video is captioned with precise acoustic description, never generic labels, each placed spatially at its exact position within the frame — total audio accessibility as compositional structure.
TECHNO-FOREST
(***) The forest documenting itself directly through technological mediation.
Transforest · Die Kapelle der Dämmerung
TIK-TOK SCORES
(**) Selected short-form videos used directly as score material to be instrument-synced by a performer.
SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE RECORDING
(**) One technician records near-field, another records from the point of arrival. After synchronizing both recordings and editing volume levels, a listener can sonically \u201ctravel\u201d between them.
STRUCTURAL SEX
(*) Mechanization and ruling of intimacy, alongside mechanization and ruling of play and toys.
SUBLIMATED FOREST
(**) The forest spoken about rather than inhabited: nature used as an external metaphor for a worldview, a mass, or a collective behavior, without ever setting foot inside it.
The Forest Who Ate a Cemetery · Monas Series · Tent Visions · Trees with Sensors · Der Wald
TOUCHING FOREST
(***) The forest as lived, physical present: sleeping inside it, hiding in it, surviving through it — direct contact without narrative, without symbol, without distance.
TREMBLING AUTOMATA
(***) An automaton whose action is made of trembling mechanics.
TREMBLING SUSPENSION
An object or being simultaneously inhabits more than one state of existence.