TAD ERMITAÑO:

ORASYON

Orasyon – a Filipino word derived from the Spanish oración. In Filipino, the word refers specifically to words such as prayers and incantations. Orasyon also contains oras -- the Filipino word for time. An orasyon is then the metered recitation of intention and desire, the sequential Word that precedes and shapes the Real in its image. The orasyonador of the exhibit are Language Machines---that extend, amplify, and stabilize thoughts; the exhibition itself is a compound and room-sized machine created to shape reality.

While it is of course possible to intend and think anything at all, Orasyon deals with intentions that have arisen within a specific historical moment. We are embedded in a chaos within which the pandemic is only an amplifier and accelerator of unsustainable and destructive tendencies that were already loose and at large in the world. Orasyon ‘s intentions are therefore both prophetic and therapeutic: mechanically augmented calls for the Real to assume a specific shape and order.

Tad Ermitaño is a key figure in new media art in the Philippines and South East Asia, with a history reaching as far back as the late 80s, when he co-founded the media collective Children of Cathode Ray.  Considered to be one of the seminal pioneers of sound art in the country as well as an explorer of experimental film, his artistic practice has since grown into an examination of the processes, semiotics, and structures surrounding man’s relationship with machinery.  His projects often involve the manipulation of sound and images interacting with spatial structures. 

Ermitaño works with a range of technologies, from digital video (Sex2Speech, 2017) and mechanical instruments (Hasa, 2015), to analog circuitry (Bell, 2011) and computer programming (Twinning Machine, 2012; and Sammy and the Sandworms, 2013).

Tad has had no formal training in the arts or in music. He was a science major, and attended the Philippine Science High School, and studied Biology at Japan’s University of Hiroshima, and Philosophy at the University of the Philippines. He trained in film and video at the Mowelfund Film Institute.

Tad has participated in numerous group exhibitions in different art institutions including Laforet Museum in Japan, the Palazzo Mora in Italy, and the Singapore Art Museum. In 2016, his work Gillages formed part of Muhon, the Philippine Pavilion’s exhibit at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.