Esteban Agosin [Chile]

BIO

Esteban Agosin is a sound and electronic media artist originally from Valparaiso, Chile. In 2024, he received a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington.

He lives and works in New York and is an assistant professor of Digital Arts and Media at Stony Brook University.

His work involves sound and media installations, robotic objects, and media performance, and it has been presented in art festivals and solo exhibitions in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Madrid, Finland, Berlin, Portugal, London and France. Furthermore, Esteban has worked as an educator at different universities in Chile, Argentina, and the United States, teaching and investigating the intersection of sound, media, and technology.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a sound and new media artist focused on the intersection between art and technology. My artistic work investigates how technological systems can offer critical perspectives for observing and understanding ecological, social, and political environments. Through speculative and experimental approaches, My work examines the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of using art and technology to reimagine alternative relationships with our surroundings.

I am fascinated by creating objects, significant and semantic apparatus, that appeal to speculative machinic worlds.

My artistic work, though still experimental and interdisciplinary, is a critical, sensitive, and reflexive position about technology, its uses, and its impact on our environment and social context. I am intereted in the experimental and DIY design and fabrication of Dys/functional devices and objects capable of exploring our natural and social phenomena through aesthetical, meaningful and sentient technological apparatus.

I understand art as a territory to push mainstream technology further, re-imagine, and redefine the predesigned. I see art as a place to imagine other possible worlds, connected to reality, territory and the materials that nature and technological systems provide.

I see myself more as a system creator than a composer who controls everything. I am meticulous with every part of the system and how they can be connected, yet I am fascinated with the unexpected results that can emerge from the system.

I am convinced that every object, installation, and system that I create can be replaced with something extremely simple, but complexity brings not only complications but also layers of density that make things more significant, bringing questions, memories, emotions, and conversations.

Art can be useless and dysfunctional, but art can be essential.