I was born in Bogotá, at 2,600 m above sea level, in a city marked by the imposing green of the Eastern Andes.
I grew up in a lively, humorous and creative family environment that was definitely a locus of inspiration for my artistic motivation. I studied Fine Arts with a focus on New Media at the Universidad de Los Andes.
Following my studies in Bogotá, I moved to the Northern Hemisphere: Göteborg, 12 meters above sea level, where I pursued a Master in Art and Technology at the Chalmers University and the IT University in Göteborg.
Later, I moved to Zurich, 408 meters above sea level, after joining the Z_node PhD program from the University of Plymouth (UK) and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.
keeping above see level… and always under construction
My artistic practice has moved between the visual arts, new media and robotics. Yet I am always open to dabble in new techniques and disciplines in order to express an idea or a feeling.
Certain ideas or threads have spanned throughout my work.
The performativity of meaning is one that became visible during my early work. I focused then on exploring art as a dynamic platform, apt for avoiding the fixity of meaning and ideal for performativity to take place in it.
Another thread follows the investigation of the human-machine interface and its implications on our perception and our senses. I focus specifically on the sense of touch.
During my master studies I was inspired by the area of ubiquitous computing and the tending disappearance of the human-machine interface. I focused on developing and researching communication technologies -emerging at that time- that allowed the transmission of information through the human body and to others through touch. I applied this technology on a series of “artistic experiments” to explore its possible implications in relation to our social interaction, human perception and to our ideas around the notion of touch. I call them “artistic experiments” because for me they suggest art as a field for the exploration of ideas and tools on a personal and collective level, stretching from the poetic to the scientific, open to all areas.
I would say there were three different atractors actively contributing to this artistic investigation during my time in Zurich.
The first was the research on touch I was pursuing during my PhD studies at the Z-Node Program. The second one evolved out of the first one. I started a long and enriching collaboration with media artist Prof. Jill Scott, who was conducting the e-skin research project and was also my PhD professor. This project focused on the development of wearable technologies that mimicked the tactile capabilities of the human skin and was aimed at expanding the expressive possibilities for blind people in the arts. My participation in the development of prototypes and workshops introduced me to the importance of concepts such as sensorial cross-modality, brain plasticity and synaesthesia for establishing new ways of connecting to the world through technological extensions.
The third was linked to the previous two. Prof. Scott had approached me regarding the video documentation for the 50 years of Artificial Intelligence Summit in Ascona, Switzerland, and thanks to this opportunity, I gained a broad view of the area’s current research and learned about a place where I would later spend some time as an artist-in-residence and research assistant: the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich (AI Lab). This was an inspirational place for me. The lab’s research focused on the concept of Embodied Artificial Intelligence, which spoke about the importance of the physical body and its interaction with the world for knowledge or intelligent behaviour to emerge. A fascinating idea that would influence my future work.
At that time, I got involved in the Yokoi Hand research project, where I gained a deeper understanding about the importance of sensorimotor coordination, tactile feedback and the role of brain plasticity in the control of the robotic prosthesis/extension. This project was a clear and suggestive example of the disappearance of the technological interface for controlling a machine. The communication between the biologic and the robotic systems happened at the sensory level: they felt each other and their interaction led eventually to their mutual adaptation.
The sensuous human-machine symbiosis revealed yet another surface of contact…
The brain’s adaptation to its machinic body extensions – a shift in the perception of our body and maybe also a shift in the way we think…
The perpetual entanglement of embodiment and touch…
Sensorial/expressive extensions for the visually impaired – or maybe a kinaesthetic body made discoverable through technological extensions.
All these ideas resonated and nurtured my artistic research in many ways.
They also offered an interesting glance of what was needed and how our already present coexistence with robotic and computational systems could develop. Just how do we want this coexistence to take place, is a question that requires a cross-disciplinary research and response. It evidenced, once again, the importance of art as an explorational ground for free speculation where knowledge and concerns from various disciplines can be brought together: a playground for the emergence of new knowledge.
Those were some of the imprints these atractors left during this time, which led to the development of Digitalized at your Service, a series of interactive performances, that continued to investigate the technological interface and the sense of touch in immersive environments, in live settings such as Digital Artweeks Festival in Zurich and the Picnic Festival in Amsterdam. This project was funded by the Sitemapping grant from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
Another seed that fell into the fertile ground of my artistic curiosity at that time, was the idea that our concepts and our language are based on our embodiment, our movement and interaction with the world. This attractive concept led me to explore the work of cognitive linguists like George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez. This resulted in an ongoing investigation in which I explore movement as a key element for communicating more instinctively with our robotic creations. A first approach to this topic occurs in 2008 when I start a collaboration with the artist and biologist Daniel Bisig, for the development of an interactive robotic installation called Hairmotions. The aim was to study the gestures of hair movement as a tool to evoke emotions. The project then obtained the Sitemapping grant from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.