We Were Humanity.
It is the project I am currently working on, in collaboration with my brother and computational scientist Joan Sol Roo.
We were humanity uses generative systems to imagine a future world inhabited by hybrid beings between artificial intelligence and organic life, who in turn imagine their ancestors: the human species.
Strange creatures roam the nature´s cyberspace and chat about their ancient past that fuses with an abstract future. In that past they were snails, prehistoric forests, computers, musical subcultures, cartoons, memes and human beings. Their fuzzy memories go through the first written recipe, a punk rock club from the 90s in Buenos Aires, houses taken over by vegetation, paleolithic granaries and data servers from the 50s. They are organic and digital memories that combine like DNA building a changing and incomprehensible cyberspace. The human, the nature and the memetic is part of the same substance that floats like a dream in an alien mind.
The technical part of the work is a mirror of its narrative part: its engine is a program - like a video game that plays itself - which builds constant real-time variations using elements from a library; 3d objects, characters equipped with artificial intelligence, dialogues with synthetic voices, sounds and animations. The recombination of these elements results in a cyberspace with countless configurations, which gives rise to new audiovisual compositions producing an emerging narrative.
Es la primera vez que pienso.
(It´s the first time that I think)
The most recent show of this project, an individual exhibition at the Mite gallery in Buenos Aires, in December 2020. It consisted of a series of small-format paintings and a generative software projection.
In this show I seek to put a face and body to the first thoughts that float in the hallucinated mind of a being that awakens to consciousness.
Tu´Hu
An exhibition at Cruda gallery in Buenos Aires, in may 2021. At a time when the strict COVID quarantine was beginning to relax, but meetings in closed spaces were still not allowed. For that reason the show was inside a window and could be seen from the street.
The installation consisted of a generative software projection, which was surrounded by a montage of native plants from the Tigre Islands, a delta near the city of Buenos Aires. For the observers located on the sidewalk, the characters and objects that are projected on the wall seemed to be in the middle of those plants, as if it were a theatrical staging.
Tu’Hu is a 4000-year-old stew, and is part of the first known recipe book, found on a Babylonian clay tablet. The strange hybrid characters between plants and artificial intelligence that appeared in the projection, remembered this recipe, mixing it with memories about an underground punk band from the 90s, as important moments of humanity.
Scanner´s delight