G.O.M.A. (Gestures of Media Acceleration) as a project began to develop concretely in October of 2024, which at that time marked a year of the Gaza genocide. Up until that point, I was writing and recording material that was addressing an idea that had been developing over the course of my life, ambient violence. I began to trace this idea further and began puzzling pieces in relation to my work.
I thought about the afternoons spent in Harvey, Illinois as a young kid. I would wait for my friends in the kitchen to go out and play soccer, meanwhile my mom would prepare dinner. While she would prepare, the Spanish television broadcast of Primer Impacto would play in the background. Primer Impacto was an afternoon daily tabloid news segment that was loaded with hyper violent imagery and shock. Yet this information was just consumed passively into our psyches within the ambience of our daily lives. But growing up in Harvey, I felt the disparity of my own urban environment amidst the construction of new nightmares created by mass media. The beginnings of ambient violence start when the contexts don’t add up and you are told to look elsewhere. A war was being waged across the middle east again, yet my town faced high crime rates, severe poverty, political corruption, and continues to deal with these same issues in the present. I had to ask myself where was the real fear being placed? Where was my empathy being misused? Which nightmare was I supposed to have now? What could the state have justified and what wasn’t? More importantly, whose distortion of reality was I living in?
Sound is no exception in creating this confusing environment. The pulsating sounds of planes swarming overhead that promote the American armed forces and yet that same propagation of sound livening up a club room at midnight. Depending on the social context, sound can serve as an agitator or a conduit for the sublime. Sound as something in awe and yet something to fear. Sound also does something physical. When pushed beyond its usual limits, it can become a medium that can overwhelm the self into a state of pure feeling and experience by pure volume. This duality in the power of sound’s social contexts and its powerful effects on the body was a starting point in which G.O.M.A. developed from.
With the use of power electronics I aim to bring attention back to the body in the form of loudness that can envelop the self and movement in which it can embody sound. I aim to explore these experiences of ambient violence through forms of music composition, performance, spoken word and movement to find moments of agency and beauty embedded within the noise.
G.O.M.A is the performance practice of artist and composer Horacio Lopez. Lopez is currently a Sonic Arts MFA Candidate at Brooklyn College. He was born in Harvey, Illinois and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.