Artists Laura Turón and David Delgado are offering an immersive art experience that heightens the senses at Hacienda Apodaca in Socorro.
For $15 on Friday, visitors to the site at 10180 Socorro Road can immerse themselves in interactive art projects, see three musical performances and enjoy a ramen and taqueria food pop-up by El Charlatan and drinks by CoCol.
There will be live music by Ziemba at 8:30 p.m., Tooths at 9:15 p.m. and Villains Kiss at 10 p.m. inside the Moonlight Adobe Hall on the hacienda’s grounds.
Doors open at 8 p.m. and tickets will stop being sold at 11:30 p.m. While walk-up admissions will be sold, Turón encourages people to buy tickets online to help ensure admission in case the event sells out. A link to buy tickets can be found at instagram.com/paradoximmersiveart/
But the festivities won’t stop at 11:30.
“So, at midnight, we’re still gonna be here and it’s gonna to be my birthday, so we’re gonna have a party,” said Turón, who will be turning 34.
The immersive art venue also regularly is open from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.
Turón and featured artist Delgado have incorporated projections that allow visitors to create art through their movements and sound. The event Friday also will be a vinyl record release celebration for “Every Shape But Triangles,” by Delgado’s band, Villains Kiss.
Albums will be for sale for $25, with a special, signed edition with a print inside going for $35. T-shirts will be $20.
Inside a room at Hacienda Apodaca, patterns created by Turón and programmed by Delgado move across the space, reflecting off a mirrored wall to make it a truly immersive experience. Visitors will be able to control the art through a dashboard.
“The piece is called ‘Imperfectly Aligned’ because it’s inspired on the moiré effect pattern, and it’s when you place one pattern on top of one another and move it around. It creates the optical illusion of movement and different patterns,” Turón said.
“I started working with this concept through a workshop that I did. And I presented this workshop at the Museum of Art and I collaborated with EM Lab to develop the concept of the workshop for the moiré effect and then later on we started making some pieces, art pieces, with these designs.”
In the past, Delgado helped her cut vinyl designs to create stencils for her art pieces.
“That’s how we started talking about creating this art installation,” she said. “And he said, ‘You know what, it’s super easy. I can help you program it.’ ”
Turón’s development of Hacienda Apodaca now includes “Imperfectly Aligned”; the “Sinestésico” art installation by Delgado, in which people create art on an exterior wall at the site through their movements; Turón’s “Paradox Pyramid”; and her traveling bus, in which visitors can leave messages of support related to the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting at Walmart.
Collector’s quality prints of Turón’s and Delgado’s works will be for sale, as will T-shirts highlighting their work.
“Some of my art pieces actually are gonna look like the patterns that you can see in here,” she said as she and Delgado sampled “Imperfectly Aligned.”
Turón said, “I started trying to combine concepts of art with science and that’s when I met the guys at the EM Lab and I started working more with optical illusions and patterns, so I also tried to make this piece be educational.”
To create the immersive art, Delgado said, “I used a program called Magic Music Visualizer. What it is, is a chain of analog effects, where you put a source and you create this chain. The order of the chain makes a difference and within each effect you can alter different parameters and it outputs it at the end. And so it allowed me to experiment a lot at creating pretty much anything.”
He said Turón was his inspiration for the visual programming.
“I was watching her. She had one of the patterns (for a piece she was working on) and the other one over it and she was manually changing the angles and zooming in, zooming out and creating all of these things, and it was really super interesting,” he said. “That was the first time that I had actually seen it. While watching her do it, I was like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ “
He said he immediately began thinking about programming the effects, knowing “I could easily make it so that you can just control this with knobs and we started talking about the idea and we were like, yeah, let’s do it.”
Delgado’s outdoor artwork, “Sinestésico,” uses sound as well as movement.
“So, outside I have an audio visual installation called ‘Sinestésico.’ ‘Synestesiac’ is the name in English. It’s based on synesthesia, which is a neurological condition where different senses are tied to each other, like you can taste colors or you can see sounds.”
He said, “In this case, that’s the concept I go with, where audio that you are listening to, whether it’s with music or with just people outside, can affect the image, can make it color or movement that can be seen, and it’s an ephemeral art piece. It’s something that only lasts as long as the interaction does.”
He said he enjoys seeing people interact with his work.
“It’s amazing, actually,” he said. “I’m always noticing. I notice like when little kids will be kind of mind blown about it, and I love that.”
He said, “Something really interesting that I’ve noticed the most, the things I find really beautiful, are usually when people aren’t even noticing that they are being captured by it, like they are facing away or walking through and they leave behind this beautiful artwork that they didn’t even notice.”
Delgado’s art extends to music. Of Villains Kiss’ music, he said: “It’s a blend definitely. I always kind of struggle to describe it, but ultimately it’s inspired by just living on the border. You really hear an infinite mix of different genres, but it falls into the genre of pop for sure — bilingual. We have songs in English and Spanish.
“I produce, I write the songs and I play synth, so there’s an electronic synth element and then from that we have a live bassist, a live guitarist and a drummer.”
Delgado found his fascination with technology and music early.
“Since I was a little kid, I used to play with music visualizers,” he said. “I’m a musician. I guess I’ve been primarily a musician for most of my life. So, when I was little, I always have been into technology. When I was 12 or 13, I built my own first computer, like all the components of it, and I used to just kind of listen to music and play with visualizers to see how the audio created something. And that was always a concept that I liked. I actually had one that creates a painting made by music.”
Delgado, a 34-year-old graduate of Socorro High School, taught himself programming.
Now, it has become an intrinsic part of who he is, as much as his music.
“Honestly, to me, all the facets of the arts that I make are kind of part of one thing. When I actually invested in the software and started configuring the projections, I’ve always tried to make our live performances immersive,” he said. “So, prior to using projections, I programmed lights to change colors and go with the song and I programmed what every color of every light will turn into on what sections and then you basically have upgraded to a more interactive visuals. You have a camera and then start processing those images to effects.”
He added: “So, to me, they are all kind of part of one thing, ultimately, when it comes together. But I don’t know. I can’t choose one or the other.”
Delgado’s saw his talent entertaining thousands when he programmed a stage at Neon Desert Music Festival for one of the acts.
“It looked amazing because I was able to use the gigantic screens on the stage, which is the way I had always envisioned to be able do it, so to have that opportunity was really cool and, honestly, it looked better than any other person’s performance.”