Arturo Moya

Arturo Moya - Monster Game

Biografía del Artista:

Interactive sound installation of 22 footballs. Variable sizes. 4,000 EUR each. Author: Arturo Moya (2020-23) Hardware and firmware design: Riley Garcia Voice: Elena Anaya 22 balls. Each one has a speaker and an electronic device inside that can detect movement. When the balls are kicked, they project a voice that is broadcast throughout the room with the movement of the ball itself. The voice stops when the ball stops. The voice comes from Mary Tudor's 1939 thesis An experimental study of the effect of evaluative labeling of speech fluency. The research sought to prove that positive or negative reinforcement significantly influenced the development of stuttering, a thesis defended by her mentor, Wendell Johnson, who himself suffered from stuttering. The study was based on two groups, one of fluent speakers and the other of children who were already considered stutterers before the study. Each of them was reinforced positively or negatively, giving rise to four subgroups depending on the starting situation and the meaning of the reinforcement. As a result of the study, some fluent children developed lifelong stuttering. The thesis was later known as the “Monster Study” or “Monster Experiment”, due to its lack of ethical considerations. The speech reproduced by the balls corresponds to the transcriptions of the interviews that the author herself held with the 22 subjects subjected to the study. 22 balls, one for each child. Monster Game is part of “Violences of Saying,” a framework that questions the invisible and formidable violence of speech. “All speech is violence, violence that is all the more fearsome because it is secret,” says Maurice Blanchot in “The Infinite Conversation.”