By GENEVA GÁMEZ-VALLEJO | November 2009

Two years after CUBO, comes CUBO: MediaWomb, a collaborative project that explores the reflection of how social space and public culture can be transformed and embraced by people.

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To understand this new embodiment of the project, you should know how CUBO came to life. Back in 2007, local artist, Camilo Ontiveros and colleague Felipe Zuñiga explored the idea of creating an object that could bring together the notion of social architecture through a transportable sound sculpture whose sound track would respond to site-specific locations. They created CUBO, an orange plastic cubed transformable object that articulated experiences in its interior and exterior.

By its final phase, CUBO had a total of 14 collaborating artists of various mediums. Its goal was mainly focused towards provoking the irruption of different sonorous gradients, incessant voices, ephemeral chronics, and ambient episodes in the city of Tijuana. CUBO made its first appearance in our border city of Tijuana, then in Los Angeles and San Diego.

MediaWomb is an organic transplant of the first CUBO, embodied in a different structure –one where the audience is not only allowed to listen in on, but also invited into. This new project is put together once again by Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zuñiga, with special collaboration by Giacomo Castagnola and Nina Waisman.

The artists describe CUBO: MediaWomb as a project that “began as a dialogical exercise in response to the media's monomaniacal presentation of Mexico as a space characterized solely by sensationalist crime. The collective wanted to complicate this image, by exploring the under-represented terrains of community and non-violence, to generate layered reflections on locality, media and material geography in relation to the body and its interactions.”

For Ontiveros, it was of extreme importance that the new CUBO would once again, reach out to the public and create some sort of reflection and discussion about news, words and sounds that surround us daily.

“…In my practice, I have focused on creating platforms for dialogs. My intention with this has been to look for alternative ways, both inside and outside existing conventions, to open forums for discussing politics and aesthetics.” He added, “In conjunction with this, my work often deals with questions about the systems that produce the societies in which we live. So, the opportunity to investigate the effects of media and open up a site for reflection to be manipulated by your own body was something that excited me about the CUBO: MediaWomb.”

Some of MediaWomb’s embodiments include mobile sculptural-sound interventions, sound and music performances, ephemeral radio transmissions, and youth-at-risk workshops in the cities of Tijuana and Los Angeles.

Taking the opportunity to sit inside of CUBO: MediaWomb and listen in on some of the clips that the media feeds us is quite extraordinary. The structure resembles an upside down sofa that wombs the guest in warmly, and is composed of recycled egg cartons, uniquely constructed by Castagnola. It has a set of dynamically impressive motion sensors that create sound, and speakers on the side that have endless news stories to tell.