Interests

I'm set on finding which is the aesthetics that reconciles men and machines. This stubbornness immersed me in a multitude of different hobbies with a common denominator: to arrive at the spring of aesthetics and to drink thirstily. It is feasible to refuse regulations and guidelines for choosing freedom, even though there is a risk, the one of living and achieving that objective which seemed unattainable. And then life is perceived, consequently, beautiful and intense.

Usability in computing depends on interfaces being friendly and intuitive, always according to objective criteria. But that is not enough: user should really see them as friendly and intuitive ones. The key to this meticulous perception is the computer screen's scenery, the aesthetics, the beauty of lines, the softness of sounds and forms, the flavour of what is first tasted by the eyes. So, interface scenery, the first impression of the computing itself given to us, should be a tempting invitation. Just like hobbies, which are irresistible invitations.

Routes and words

I delight in natural landscapes, in wind playing new notes when slithering through the leaves holding up and coming down, sideways between the lines of nature. Which are not straight but curved, and inviting to walk one's own way, which even though it looks like the most difficult one, it is not: mountain is a speaking friend, asking for explanations, for answers, before the return. I am a hiker because I can't do without a chance for facing life and going more deeply into the life I am leading in town and the one I want to transmit.

It is the unceasing search for flowing life that makes me travel, beyond the mountain this time. I want to get to know the message transmitted by the unchanging and immortal beauty of a gothic cathedral, the music of foreign speech, texture of the skin here and over there, the gastronomic aesthetics. I want to swap stories under universal roofs, and to find out, from my own experience, how bitter or sweet taste others' experiences. But it is not all movement and physical dynamism: there's lots of room for the motionless motion, for the intellectual dynamism, for reading, experimenting and feeling the magic of the words, for discovering how extensive knowledge is.

Music in motion

So long as I love fine arts, I am a heterogeneous and cosmopolitan dilettante, and there's also here an unceasing search as a common denominator. Music, particularly contemporary music —brainy and speculative— is an inclination that invites me to learn first and to stand in a receptive mood afterwards, in order to get a reward in return. This receptive attitude —clear also in every action of teaching— means to explore musical landscapes, to observe instrumental colours and to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the dissonances, harmonic tensions hardly solved by current music.

«To be keen to explore musical structures makes you feel architect», this is what Luciano Berio suggested. He also learnt from Pierre Boulez that «the aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music»: I agree, since we can understand Ludwig van Beethoven's «Pastoral» Symphony, but we are unable to translate the musical experience but into a reference to the music itself. Some other composers appear also on my shelves: Elliott Carter, Olivier Messiaen, Olga Neuwirth and Arnold Schönberg, just to mention a few; and also some other musics: modern jazz and music from India, Middle East, Indonesia and North Africa.

Despite being convinced of the eloquence of silences, I am in the same way an occasional, vocational, no venal composer. And my fondness for contemporary dance falls within this context of music as a necessary tool or vehicle. I like self-expression through movement like a word driven by music and made evident in a body in motion. Here again: aesthetics language, interpretation of speaking with no words. Standing out particularly Anne Terese de Keersmaeker's choreographic expressions with an almost mathematical clarity, and Cesc Gelabert's works, a dancer with sober and extraordinary gracefulness.

Mixed impressions

Painting, sculpture and architecture have known how to make themselves some room among my interests; and secondly, photography, installations and video art. It's aesthetics looking for new ways to state beauty and communication with no words. While having different approaches, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier hold important spaces in this world of architectonic frameworks. The same way as August Macke, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky do in the space of pictorial frameworks. I consider that twentieth-century sculpture attempts to give three dimensional reasons for the two dimensional questions raised by painting. And I admit to escape study for yielding to another passion: cooking. And on top of that, I have the nerve to compare them; I want to match textures and paintings, flavours with colours. After all, everything is symphony, everything leaves you open-mouthed.