Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

The Curated Collection includes projects that have been selected by Art Blocks’ Curation Board for their world-class innovation, technical rigor, and aesthetic beauty.

curated

This collection comprises projects screened and selected by Art Blocks and embodies our standards for artistic creativity, conceptual rigor, and technical achievement.

presents

This is the place where we tinker. What lives here is free of theme or architecture but the one common strand is that these projects all grant us delight.

explorations

The Art Blocks × Pace collection includes boundary-pushing generative projects by select Pace artists developed in partnership with Pace Verso.

artblocksxpace

Through an exhibition program that extends across galleries globally, Art Blocks × Bright Moments showcases and launches the work of acclaimed natively generative artists.

artblocksxbrightmoments

siempre en mi, siempre en ti (“always in me, always in you”) is released as part of reGEN, a special charitable auction of generative art to raise funds for Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, curated by Alex Estorick and Foteini Valeonti in collaboration with The Giving Block.  100% of primary proceeds of this project go to the cause.

siempre en mí, siempre en ti (always in me, always in you) is a personal reflection on how Alzheimer's affects the lives of patients and those around them. The illness is in my family and in that of close friends of mine, and this work is more of a raw expression of emotion than anything else. Holding hands with a person who is fading away is a strong experience, one that allows oneself to recalibrate and to, in a way, regenerate one's vision of what life is, what a person is, what relationships are. It's commonplace to hear that a loved one who is already gone is still alive "in our memory". The truth is that this is the case when we are all alive and good as well, but only take notice when there is a crossing over event. We don't see the person almost anymore, but there's a body there that sometimes still reacts. How much of what we ignore that is going on is relevant? Is this song we just played relevant? What do emotions look like when the brain that processes them is failing? Are we ready to understand those, with our limited knowledge of what we are? Is the person still there when there is no sign of them? And when they are not there, why can we not cut the cord? The simple touch of their skin is enough to make the person come alive in that instant in our very memories. Maybe we are in theirs, in that moment, in a shape we don't comprehend.

Visually, the project merely projects faces. Fading, waving. Unstable, some smiling, some sad. A diversity of lives emerges in the piece, exploring with generative techniques the emotions of you, the experiencer of the piece. Maybe it does not resonate with you, but maybe it gives you a chance to connect with those feelings that are otherwise hard to get close to. We see a person and their dreams, their ideas, their memories as dancing colorful geometries. Their fears, ther recurring thoughts. But sometimes they look like a nightmare. Sometimes they are mute. We see some lines where the faces are enclosed. These are a template for a human, the lines that dictate where our facial features should be. But they dance with the memories as time passes by - is our notion of human also a moving target? Sometimes you will see more than one face, an expression of the many lives we might have lived. And at any time, we can summon a view of the piece where we see you in me. _You in me_.

Allowing ourselves to be a companion of someone else's difficult passage is a window into our own humanity. An occasion for regeneration.

Works best on Chromium browsers. Firefox macos has some problem with geometries drawn with p5.js in webGL mode. The piece is graphics intensive and requires a powerful setup to experience it best.

press s to save image
press v to start recording video, v again to finish and download (webm format)
press f to fast forward 100 frames
click mouse, tap on screen or press l (as in loop) to pause/resume the motion
type youinme to see how we all carry each other within ourselves

URL parameters - add a trailing ? if it's the 1st parameter you add, then & for the rest; e.g. 
https://generator.artblocks.io/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/477000000?pd=4&fs=1&fM=6

pd=N in live view URL to set pixel density to N (N>2 increase resolution)
fs=1 in live view URL to set the artwork to render adaptively to the current viewport size, instead of the default square aspect ratio
fM=x with x any number to make the animation stop at that frame number

pd=N in live view URL to set pixel density to N (N>2 increase resolution)
fs=1 in live view URL to set the artwork to render adaptively to the current viewport size, instead of the default square aspect ratio
fM=x with x any number to make the animation stop at that frame number

siempre en mí, siempre en ti

Our lives are scattered across several time scales, and the meaning of every event that takes place depends on the time scale that we choose to define & observe them from. Yet we fail to fully comprehend this in our daily errands. Entretiempos is an artwork that reflects on this, based on an aesthetic that pays a tribute to the works of Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka and other painters from their era, recreated by the usage of intersecting rings that create a varied and rich space.

The work plays with the time scales by painting dynamically and letting the viewer pause the work, restart, set it to loop indefinitely, painting and vanishing in an endless cycle. And it can be set to be done at varying speeds, to appreciate what happens in between the time scales ("entre tiempos", in Spanish).

Also, there is a broader theme that I find of interest to explore from every work that I engage with. It has to do with the concept of what I call total cognitive space, or the total range of possibilities that can be expressed / achieved with a given scenario and set of conditions. In this case, I was interested in expanding my rendition of the works of Delaunay into a broader space. How does this approach scale with varying parameter ranges? Is the painting still interesting? Can it express something new? Connected to this, I am also interested in thinking about what emotions would mean for an artificial sentient being. We talk about artificial intelligence, but leave aside artificial emotions all too often. While artificial intelligences are indeed interesting, we fail to recognize the paramount importance of emotions in human behaviour. To this end, this work explores also the result of painting with machine-like precision vs. performing the artwork with a range of possible imprecisions. The perfection of the machine vs. the imperfection of the human, does it trigger different emotions in us humans? What will the reaction of a machine be whenever they develop a taste?

This work exposes features that deal with its time and space scales, background colour, background elements, the palettes used, certain colour accents that may happen (golden accents, b&w tones), the style used to draw the geometric shapes (fill, lines, outline), the degree of paint precision and other features that influence the final result. The user may download a PNG file at any arbitrary resolution at any step of the paint process using the commands provided for that. A brief list of commands is as follows. Please note that you need to click on the artwork first to make sure it will receive the typed commands:

p to pause/resume the work
r followed by y to enter the looping mode
d followed by +/- or any number from 1 to 9 to increase resolution
s followed by c to save current image
s+f to automatically save the final image when the system finishes painting
s+m to restart and save a sequence of images of the process
r+0 (zero) to reset all parameters and resolutions and restart
k at any time to define keyframes, then r+0 to restart the work and it will automatically pause at defined steps, or s+i and the work will restart and automatically save an image at every keyframe defined with k. Reload browser to reset.

There is an Easter egg hidden in every work.

For the full project description, inspiration and rationale, as well as the full list of features and controls plus a hint at the Easter Egg, please visit the project homepage at https://www.iillucid.com/entretiempos

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

siempre en mí, siempre en ti

entretiempos

Art

Company

Learn