Los Aparatos is one person and a workbench in Tucumán, Argentina. Mateo Carabajal — electronic engineer, teacher, musician — has been doing hardware hacking and building homemade synthesizers with Arduino since 2008. CDM covered him on 17 August 2026, prompted by the Auduina MK2 opening up international shipping; before that these things mostly circulated inside Argentina. There are three instruments. Auduina MK2 is a small desktop granular synth in opal white acrylic over laser-cut MDF with a dark oak finish, its knobs printed in PLA, with an optical sensor, a touch sensor and CV in. CoyuyoC is an analog drone synth built around the 555 timer: two triangle-wave oscillators interacting continuously to produce "organic drones and unstable harmonics," in a housing shaped like an insect whose two wings are the potentiometer knobs. Drawdio is a pen that makes sound when graphite, a coin, a plant, your hand, or almost anything conductive completes the circuit. And there is a free web app called secuenciador de luz — a sequencer made of light.

What that web app does is simple enough to walk straight past. You program a step sequence in the browser and the page flashes your screen in that pattern; you point the instrument's optical sensor at the screen, and the instrument is now being driven by it. The display, in this arrangement, is not a display. Everything about it as an engineered object — gamut, gamma, refresh rate, PWM dimming — exists so that a human eye receives a stable image, and the bare physical fact that it emits photons is treated throughout as a means and never as content. Flicker above all: panel engineering has spent decades and enormous money suppressing flicker, because flicker is precisely what the construct called "display" overflows and must push out. Carabajal wires that discarded term straight into an instrument. The screen becomes a patch cable. Not as a figure of speech — the circuit actually closes: no driver, no protocol, no API, just light.

The same move recurs across all of it. Drawdio takes its signal from the resistance of a graphite line: you draw, you slide the tip along what you drew, the pitch follows. But a pencil line, in any drafting training, is supposed to be even — steady pressure, uniform deposit, no blotches. A large part of what "drawing well" means is suppressing the material unevenness of the medium until it stops being visible. Drawdio makes that suppressed term the entire musical content: where you bore down the pitch drops, where you smudged it wobbles. Skin does the same work — body resistance is an interference term in electronic design, the thing you shield against, and here it is the string. CoyuyoC advertises "unstable harmonics" as a feature, meaning the beating and intermodulation between two 555s, which in any 555 application note is a defect to be killed with decoupling and buffering. Every one of these instruments takes its signal from the pile swept outside the boundary once the design spec has drawn one.

There is a second remainder that lives not in the circuit but in the tariff schedule. CDM puts it plainly: it is vital that these are made in Argentina, because importing into that market is punishing. So the circuits have to be designed around what can actually be bought in Tucumán — 555s, Arduino, laser-cut MDF, self-printed PLA. These are not retro-flavored choices; they are the fossil of a customs regime. The northern DIY synth world — Berlin, Portland, Brno — has long since been fully digested by the art world: it has festivals, acquisitions, a complete ready-made aesthetic vocabulary. The Tucumán branch has none of that. Its forms grew out of a constraint other people never had to face, and in the existing account that constraint is not an aesthetic category at all, so there is nowhere to file it. One thing must be said cleanly: Drawdio is not his invention — it is Jay Silver's, out of the MIT Media Lab, and before that PAiA's John Simonton was already making resistive sound circuits. What Carabajal did is not first authorship but re-grounding: rebuilding the idea inside a different material economy, and giving every unit analog I/O so the pieces patch into each other. Blur that distinction and you are passing off an already-construct as a remainder.

The hardest thing here to name is the Academia tab. The site carries a run of Spanish-language tutorials, starting from the Atari Punk Console, teaching you to build these things yourself; the Drawdio tutorial gets its own page. Which means the primary output of the practice is not objects but other people's capacity to make objects. The art world has no slot for that. It has "DIY electronics," "circuit bending," "critical making," "maker culture," "decolonial technology," "Latin American sound art" — every one of them adjacent, not one of them large enough to hold something that is simultaneously a shop, a school, and a signed body of work. It is also, awkwardly, for sale: sixty-eight dollars on Tindie. The art world's way of handling a commodity is to read it as a copy of the work, but here the order is reversed — the object is a worked example of the tutorial. This naming gap is not obscurity. It is that the output settles in a currency the art world does not count.

Why look now: the remainder is being spent by its own success. Two things are happening at once. "Global South DIY" and "decolonial technology" have hardened very fast as curatorial categories these last few years — the vocabulary is stocked, the slot is cleared, and once this work is filed there, what remains will be a thoroughly likeable already-construct: exhibitable, fundable, restateable. The second is more specific and closer at hand: international shipping just opened. International shipping is exactly the signal that the wall which made these design decisions necessary has begun to fail. Loosen the wall and the forms that grew around scarcity degrade from structural necessity into style — pink knobs, insect housings, laser-cut MDF will read as charming lo-fi handmade-ness rather than as the imprint left by a forced bill of materials. The chisel-construct cycle is running faster here than usual, because what is pushing this toward construct is not criticism but logistics. The giant cicada that wrecks the siesta in Tucumán is still sitting on the enclosure. Once it is behind museum glass it will just be a shape.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics