Chucho (Jesús) Ocampo Aguilar is a Mexican artist and architect working in the intersection of art, architecture, and technology. At the heart of his practice lies the concern of how, through interfaces, workshops, walking, and appropriation of spaces we can misuse, misinterpret, and detour deterministic conceptions of our milieu. Using drifting/erring as a tool, Chucho seeks to challenge preconceptions around scale, use-function, migration, bureaucracy, citizenship, and our relation to the more than human entities. He is currently a second-year SMACT candidate of the ACT program at MIT, where he cofounded PPPPRESS, a student-run independent press. In parallel, Ocampo works as Creative Director and partner in dérive LAB: an art, architecture, and urbanism firm with projects related to housing, urban design, public space interventions and cultural management, and is cofounder of BEMA: a cultural center in Queretaro, Mexico.

The Anthropophagic Relational Interfaces

The Severing is a foundational, traumatic fissure between, to put it in stark Lacanian terms, reality (the correlated human world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman parts of the biosphere). Since nonhumans compose our very bodies, the Severing has likely produced physical as well as psychic effects, scars of the rip between reality and the real.

- Timothy Morton, Humankind

The Anthropophagic Relational Interfaces are meant to reimagine new ways of experiencing the environment and our relation to more-than-human entities and of entering into the break that exists between scales and modes of understanding the environment and our relations with our milieu.

I am interested in asking why, even after seeing the graphs, the data, visualizations, and having the devices to do so, we do not seem to respond to the current climate emergency on the one hand, and on the other, we do not seem to come up with a different way of understanding how to live together. Call it Severing, alienation, anthropocentrism, Anthropocene, or Capitalocene. What is the proper timescale to measure sovereignty, jurisdictions, planning, or politics, and how can we relate to this multiplicity of scales affectively, performatively, aesthetically, and collaboratively? In other words, how to provoke other ways of seeing?

What if we need some sort of sensory integration therapy for the recalibration of our senses as a way to start thinking in multiple scales and multiple modes of living? And if so, what would be the tools to do so? Through intricately understanding bureaucracy and similar sense-making apparatuses, mistranslating, misusing, rescaling, and redoing, the intention is to deploy this uncanny instrumentarium - a series of relational, double-edged interfaces- in the public sphere in the form of walking antennas, scanning devices, hearing interfaces, mobile seismographs, kite cyanometers, walking light sensors, water seeking vehicles, or repurposed architectural infrastructures.

Fieldwork, Walking as Scale

There is an exciting and paradoxical situation here: if the interfaces are global in their technology and in their understanding, the deployment of them must be local. This methodology uses interfaces that are in part assembled in situ and react to specific material needs and aesthetic choices that are informed by the situations. Say, in the case of Boston, interfaces respond to the built and unbuilt environment; they will depend on topography, how big or tall buildings are, or on the permissiveness of the public sphere and its regulations. Taipei has very specific regulations and public life dynamics, different that the ones found in the city of Queretaro or Guadalajara. How collaborative can these interfaces be within the constraints of every environment? How can they provoke interaction in different localities?