if you read this is a multidisciplinary project about the human desire for connection. It consists of three interconnected parts: a text publication, an EP with text-based (electronic) soundtracks, and a live performance. Each part reinforces the others, contributing to a layered narrative about proximity, absence, and the fragile nature of human contact. The starting point is a personal experience of “ghosting” — an abruptly broken-off relationship without explanation — which serves as a catalyst for broader reflection on how communication, intimacy, and loss relate to the structures of our digital existence. By combining self-written texts and found fragments (both online and offline), a new narrative emerges at the intersection of literature, performance, and sound art.

publication
first edition, 2025 (100 copies)
design by callum dean
printing and binding by no kiss
published by n.k.g. publications
ISBN/EAN 978-90-835501-0-7

ep 23:16 min
first edition, lathe cut (10 copies)
in collaboration with poonex globo
text, vocals and by kay schuttel
mixing by seamus cater
mastering and cutting by disc archive

Special thanks to Rubén Patiño, Romy Day Winkel and Anat Spiegel

The text-based sound piece “A shoulder appears” describes two bodies finding rest in an entanglement. The work follows the abstract narration on proximity, closeness, disconnection, and distance. An interplay with multiple voices telling the story from different perspectives investigating the notion of being in- and out of connection; the body in relation to itself, the other and space.
In contrast with how repetitive and detached our lives have become in the digital age, this work offers a deeper observation on human condition and reveals hidden moments of vulnerability at an intersection of sound, text, and storytelling.

Published on Nocturnalities

Inspired by asynchronous communication, the text-based sound piece "The girl is confused" explores the interplay of time, voice, and human communication in the digital realm.
Different narratives - from various sources - are intertwined and unveil insights into contemporary communication dynamics, transcending conventional boundaries and provoking contemplation on the intersection of technology, identity, and temporality.  While analyzing the generic, rhetorical, and linguistic practices performed online and offline, "The girl is confused" moves in between storytelling, social commentary, and experimental music.

The performance was part of SURGES, an evening in Radion co-organized with Toni Brell, Constanza Castagnet and Ghenwa Noire

Curated by Sean Oriordan

“Images found while scrolling” is a Text-Based soundpiece created in my early days of motherhood, getting (more) confused while scrolling trough the images of other mothers.

The text is part of the publication "Perdu Writing Workshop" and has been performed in Perdu, Experimentik, Radion and AU_jus

Skin Care is series of sonic compositions that aim to resignify the use of language in relation to social media and beauty.
By selecting juxtaposing and transforming material from diverse online sources, we have created a performance that includes live vocals, 4 channel audio sound spatialization and video. The piece attempts to generate a sensorial experience that moves in between story telling, ASMR, poetry and experimental music.

Turmeric is ongoing series of written observations focused on human behavior in our digital age. The texts move around themes like agency, performing identity, beauty, social media and motherhood .
The work serves as a form of social commentary - illustrating repetitive and detached our lives have become in the digital age.

Rubén Patiño and Kay Schuttel are interdisciplinary artists working across sound and performance. At CTM 2020, the pair premiere their new work No Laughing Matter, which explores laughing in relation to bodily presence and acousmatic sound. As laughter is seen as a uniquely human gesture, the sound of laughter is employed as compositional material for psychological conditioning in their performance

Originated as a re-interpretation of the “laugh track”, a sound effect featured prominently in TV sitcoms, the project tries to explore the synergy between the enjoyable and the uncanny. No Laughing Matter aims to create a transitional space in between fun and fear that muddles the boundaries of human voice versus synthetic sound, male and female acoustic and amplified, imaginary and real. Using humor as a subversive tool questions certain rigid standards and a persistent excess of "seriousness" in contemporary electronic music.

Present Continuous is a work realized in collaboration with DISSONANTS, a series of performance & technology in Estruch (Sabadell, Spain).
Patiño & Schuttel's project is a sonic composition for five mobile phones in which participatory elements and bodily presence ar combined in relation to space. The audience is encouraged to use bodily movements and transitions in space to transform the perception of the composition for themselves and the other members of the audience.
The piece consist of five separate sound files, which all combined form one composition. Its created for five members of audience, with the sound playing trough the speaker of their mobile phone.
The electronic composition by Patiño & Schuttel is combined with vocal instructions, that directs the participants to use their phone and their body to control their listening experience and became aware of the perception of sound. At the same time the potential of sound is used to create a sense of collectivity, performed in a time in which social distancing is the norm, and awareness of physical presence.

Composed by four parts, Stand by is a performance conceived with a time-based structure staged by six young dancers in an art gallery. Initially closed to the audience, the place hosts the performers who pretend to act as people using laptops, mobiles and tablets in daily life, but under the gaze of the public that can look through a glass vitrine. Kept outside but still present, the audience is recorded by cams to appear on the same devices, becaming subject of his same gaze.

The performance thus tends to blur and rewrite the role of the audience, and the act of reversing the point of view turn the nature of the event. A shift that finally materialize itself when the audience is allowed to enter inside the gallery, and to feel empathy with the setting of the room. Unconfortable, illuminated by the screens, deprived of furniture, the room is the visual synthetise of a feeling that is common to younger generations. Used to live in a mass society more and more built to enhance the alienation, the exploitation, the consumerism. In this frame, to share a place in a cold and dark architecture could appear a resolution, as a moment in which taking rest after having wait for long without knowing the motivation, as following an invisible fight. This state of perceived and real immobility, a real experience of a “stand by”, allow the comparaison of humankind with the tecnhological machines that we use to leave in this mode when are not more necessary to us.


Text by Alessandra Franetovich

This project is generously supported by Mondriaan Fund

What you are hearing right now is a work realized with the support of OGR - Officine Grandi Riparazioni, in collaboration with CRIPTA747, curated by Elisa Troiano, Alexandro Tripodi, Renato Leotta, Marianna Orlotti (Turin).
Patiño & Schuttel's project is a composition of electronic music combined with vocal instructions that drive us into a synchronized collective sound experience with a deep-rooted dystopian mood.
Inspired by the concept of Ether, the universal field of energy that connects everything in Greek mythology, the key elements of the piece are synchronicity in time and multiplicity in space. What you are hearing right now is an audio tour that invites participants to immerse themselves in a sonic realm that expands the experience of each individual’s surroundings by transcending the boundaries of the physical world while creating imaginary mental spaces, interconnectedness, and a sense of belonging.
To participate in the experience, listen to the track on a portable device - such as your cell phone - with headphones, and share your shots along with the hashtags.

An exhibition space is fullfilled by a choreography acted by six performers, whose movements are focused on the practice of stretching and warming up their bodies. Creating the expectation of a different event that is going to happen soon, they continue this ritual dance while the audience moves freely in the area. Whereas these two groups are united in the common use of the body to move and fill the space, the commonly perceived distance between the observer and the observed is interrupted by the ask for an active participation of the audience. The activation of the soundtrack for the performance, to be done using a QR code and therefore their own mobiles, is conceived to be on charge of the audience.

On Demand (2019) bases its premises on the reflection about the methods of interaction between the performers and the public of art events. A fundamental point for the development of performance art since the beginning of this discipline, as well as in Kay Schuttel's production, this interplay is here structured to highlights slight but impactful changes in this relationship introduced by the use of digital devices during the fruition of art events. Not only devices usefull to take photographs and share information on social medias, mobile permits the use websites and apps that can offer media for the creation and realisation of artworks, showing at the same time how much the strategies of empathy deployed by technology market entered our own way of thinking the environment in which we live and think.


Text by Alessandra Franetovich

Selected from the Unsound open call, this is a new work in the format of an audio tour, in which participatory elements and bodily presence are combined in relation to space. The idea is to address the potential of sound to create imaginary mental spaces that transgress physical constraints, creating interconnectedness and a sense of belonging.
The project consists of an electronic composition by Patiño & Schuttel, combined with vocal instructions that direct the participants into an imaginary soundscape. As part of the instructions the listener will be guided outdoors, to a park or a natural environment (urban or natural). The listener will be directed through voice and sound into a sonic realm that expands the experience of each individual’s surroundings.
The sound walk is conceived to be experienced outdoors in a park or natural environment, with the starting point of the soundwalk will be defined by each participant. Participants need to be in their selected destination, ready at 19:00 CEST with headphones and a smart phone phone with Internet.

As an oxymoron, the title reveals a reversed perspective in the dynamics between humanity and technology, that seeks to examine how much the use of devices is affecting our approach to the knowledge and the experience of the world. The figures are in fact presented in a dress-code that is casual, coeval, but at the same time aseptic, appearing deprived by their own individuality and singularity. In a time in which the relationship and the feeling of being part of a community is reached through the use of technological apparatus and the invention of a double digital identity, it seems unavoidable for humans to be gears of a mega-machine that nowadays is moved by the use and abuse of emotions. Selfie as a mirror, a call as a caress, scrolling as the will of research, this is the era in which forms of life are encapsulated inside the device. Thus the paradoxical form of feeling together while being alone in front of a screen, and the consequential appearance of a new form of love and tenderness towards the technological devices.
With the increasing loss of privacy policies in front of a global scale community, the weight of the body, as well as the space it occupies, still represents the possibility of affirming our life, or at least an occasion to dissect our gestures and movements. To see ourselves framed from the outside. Therefore, the performative approach of the work, that is at the core of Kay Schuttel's poetics, is here represented as a ritual minimal dance defined by the daily gestures that accompany our use of mobile phone. The performers are yet transfigured into moving images stuck in repetitive and encoded movements that the machine itself requires. Reversing the perspective is intended as revelatory act, and the video projection of these solitary dances is frozen into different fragments. As isles, close but detached from each other.

Text by Alessandra Franetovich

This project is generously supported by
Mondriaan Fund

Acted by a group of young performers, Where are you now? revolves around the paradox of mirroring human private attitudes towards digital devices, but acted in public environments. With their eyes staring on digital screens while surrounded by the pervasive sounds generated by the activity of scrolling, the performers look immersed in their own private and imaginary space. Likely to be confused with the audience, they repeat the same movements participating to a wider choreography, that aims to catch the common habit of alienating from the crowd using mobiles. As mirrors distorted enough to reflect the customs deconstructing the mechanisms behind them, the performers push the audience in the encounter with himself and his own social behaviour.
As the title reveals, spatial and temporal dimensions are asked to solve the enigma about the existence of humankind, but the question remains without any reply. At the end the empathy and self-identification with the observed expresses the sense of vulnerability of human soul drown in his own solitude. The question addressed to the pronoun “you” losts its apparent specifity when the subject fades away in the undefined state of the word. Valid both for the singular than the plural form in the blurring English language, “you” becomes a generic “other”, and, for extension, could include the entire humankind. The inquiry to this state of indeterminacy lays at the core of this performative work, offering a reflection on social relationships in the Digital age.

A choreography in which five performers walk in loops, greeting each other with the rhetorical question: ‘how are you?’ Referring to a film scene in the streets of American suburbia, the sequence is repeatedly enacted and literally rewound in real-time: the performers retracing their steps, walking backwards, to then start again from the top. Upon each encounter the phrase is replayed, each time emphasising the performance of language distanced from its original meaning.
Intrigued by the social codes and unwritten rules embedded in everyday exchanges, this intervention explores the performance of these three words on encountering someone in the street. The scene becomes a mirror reflecting the looped rounds of daily movements and the intentionally unasked and unanswered phrase: ‘how are you?’