Projects

The Three Body Solution turns the simulated gravitational motion of three bodies into musical control messages (MIDI). Distances, velocities, phases and crossings between three bodies determine pitch, when notes begin, how strongly they are played and how long they last across three configurable musical voices.

YOU DO NOT CONTROL THIS MACHINE asks an institution to lend computing power while surrendering a specific authority over its use. Someone outside the institution requests a quantity of computing resources, and an available machine commits those resources before receiving the encrypted program it will run. The requester receives the useful result; the institution retains the machine, the responsibility for operating it, and a visible residue drawn from traces of the computation that have been reduced to limit what they reveal.

Computational Cadavre Exquis constructs an exquisite corpse from found sentences. Starting with a chosen sentence, the software locates a source containing it, appends the next sentence, and then searches for that new sentence in a different source. Each assembled passage appears continuous while moving between distinct authored texts.

Controlled Permeability is a generative moving-image work built around photorealism without physical realism. Surfaces, objects, and volumes retain coherent light, scale, and geometry while selectively exchanging properties across biological, mineral, synthetic, and designed matter. A polished shell may become soft or porous; a membrane may acquire mineral density; a pore may open into an architectural chamber; an object may become an environment and then return to object scale.

Memoriae Urbis (Memories of the City) is a generative moving-image work in which an ordinary urban present appears saturated with inherited memories. Its streets display evidence of duration, repair, regulation, adaptation, use, weathering, and growth, although no coherent historical process can explain how those signs accumulated together.

Musifold is a browser-based tool for exploring how the same musical structures appear on different instrument layouts. It presents iPad, iPhone and Ableton Push-style layouts alongside scales, modes, chords, arpeggios, different arrangements of chord tones and jazz phrases.

The National Average is a generative artwork and research system about the politics of aggregation. Rather than using an average as an apparently neutral result, it exposes the operations through which an average is produced: what is included, how things are weighted, how values are normalised, and in what representational space they are compared.

This Shader Does Not Exist is a browser artwork that presents one animated image at a time. Each image is produced by a shader, a small program that runs on the graphics processor. The visitor may remain with it, pause its movement, relinquish it through another, or take the code so that its executable form can continue elsewhere.

LA MASA is a short film about a fictional Mexican Space Agency, nicknamed “La MASA”, that in 1960 was able to send an astronaut to a remote planet using a combination of traditional Mesoamerican magic and experimental technology.

Abandoned Future (2025) consists of six large-format digital prints of fictional abandoned factories. Generated images of crumbling concrete, rusting steel and overgrown vegetation draw on Uruguay’s industrial architecture, placing the promise of modernisation beside the material appearance of its abandonment.

Ave Imperator places selected Palestinian accounts of bombardment, displacement, imprisonment and everyday life within altered recordings of presidents and prime ministers. Podiums, flags, microphones and the gestures of official appearances remain visible, while the speech they seem to authorise comes from people whose vulnerability is usually represented at a distance from political power.

This is an automatic summarisation of Kamala Harris's and Donald Trump's 2024 presidential debate, where I extracted the passages in which they presented their ideas and projects aiming to improve American foreign policy and its impact on the world.

Hommage Numérique is an experimental short film that draws inspiration from the daring aesthetics of early 20th-century avant-garde filmmakers such as Marcel Duchamp, Dudley Murphy, Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Len Lye, and especially Hans Richter.

Between 1973 and 1985, Uruguay—like many countries in Latin America—lived under a military dictatorship marked by widespread human rights violations: more than 15,000 political prisoners, systematic torture in detention centres, summary executions, and enforced disappearances.

Be Water is an interactive installation that creates fluid-like movements in a flexible screen that is pulled by a motor. The installation uses a digital camera and machine learning to track the faces of its visitors to then predict their heart rate by monitoring changes in the skin colour. The frequency and patterns of the pulling combine the detected heart rates; the resulting fluid movements visualise the combined heartbeats of the installation’s visitors.

Using a commercially available, low-fidelity electroencephalography (EEG) sensor, Muse, I captured the electrical activity of my brain while performing different tasks. The resulting video, Brain Portraits, showcases several of these dynamic, abstract, snapshots of my brain working.

DOOR and BOX are two artworks of an ongoing series of works aiming to research and expose some of the social and political impact of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and automation. These two projects use a computer vision system that predicts the interactor’s ethnicity, and change their behaviour depending on this prediction: the door is only unlocked if its user is white; the gumball machine delivers free candy only if its user is white.

A few little tests and exercises. Most of these were created as examples for my students of the course Mathematics and Art (SM1801) at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

Extraordinary Accident is a virtual reality artwork that reflects on Hong Kong’s urban experience, focusing on the differences and similarities that different perceptual scales may offer.

Memoirs of the Blind is an interactive installation consisting of a screen showing a black-and-white picture of a face with its eyes closed. This image at first remains still, however, when the interactor blinks, the installation detects it and takes a photo at the exact time of the blinking. Once the new face is obtained, it is processed (cropped, desaturated, and adjusted) and then it substitutes the displayed face.

Generative prints. Created using Processing and Photoshop. (Click to enlarge.)

An audiovisual journey exploring the tension between composition and improvisation, digital and analogue, abstract and figurative. Made with Unity, Maya, Mudbox, Processing, and Premiere.

The piece proposes a reflection on the representation of the human body, from the representation itself, in addition to reflecting on the philosophical significance of the body. The work explores the relationship between the digital representation of the body and its corporeity.

The Blind Spot is an artwork comprising two systems interacting with each other. On one hand, a VR headset is used. On the other, the work uses an EEG sensor as a form of brain–computer interaction. Between the two systems lie human perception and processing.

AWKWARD CONSEQUENCE consists of individual experiences in a collective space. A live music performance unfolds simultaneously in virtual and physical space.

This work explores several topics that I am interested in: the development of instruments for visual performance, the relationship between visuals and sound / music, as well as exploring non-verbal communication: what new modes of communicating one's emotional state can be created?

Homs, a city in western Syria, was a major industrial centre. With a population of at least 652,609 people in 2004, it was the third largest city in the country. It was also the "capital of the revolution" after residents embraced the call to overthrow the president in early 2011 and much of the city fell under the control of the opposition.

5500 is both a musical performance and a data visualisation performance. It consists of a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique, where the pianist’s execution is disrupted using computer–controlled electrodes which stimulate the nerves in their arms causing involuntary contractions of his or her muscles, and affecting the final musical result.

Foreign Helpers is an interactive installation created within Post-Industrial Landscapes 3.0, Architectural Association Visiting School Hong Kong 2015.

Trace Pavilion is the third in a series of bamboo pavilions designed and built by architecture students at University of Saint Joseph in Macau.

Barcelona is an interactive installation. Its interest resides not only in its aesthetic proposal, but also in that it shows how media appropriation allows artists to reclaim and re-signify the technological production while reflecting on the relationship between DIY practices and state-of-the-art technologies.

Poem Race is a tongue–in–cheek interactive installation proposing a reflection on the socioeconomic role of contemporary art. Having grown tired of artist rankings (does it make any sense to say that Shakespeare was the best English writer? What does it mean to 'be the best'?) The piece allows to 'compare' classic English poets attempting to provide an objective, yet absurd, comparison method: poem racing.

Smile is a mixed-media installation consisting of a screen situated in a black box, mounted on the wall. The screen is black. However, when an interactor smiles at the installation, drone-footage of the ruins of Gaza, digitally slowed-down by the artist, fades in. If the interactor stops smiling, the video stops. It only plays when the interactor smiles broadly at it.

Credits Video: Tatjana Kudinova, Tomas Laurenzo, Guillermo Berta Music: Tomas Laurenzo, Guillermo Berta Production: Christian Clark

Two Systems participated in The Age of Experience, a collective exhibition at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, curated by Dr Harald Kraemer.

Facing Interaction was the research project that arose during my Fellowship at Microsoft Research, where I collaborated with Dr. Qin Cai in the creation of several prototypes of interactive artworks. In this project we explored how sensations and emotional states might be communicated non-verbally to others, to ourselves, to objects, or even to places.

Lituania Lituania was an audiovisual show and collective. Combining live music, live visuals, projection mapping, and, in one case, a modified version of Celebra, we pursued the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: a work bringing its different artistic forms into a single whole.

Walrus is an interactive mirror that substitutes a participant’s face with previously recorded faces in similar positions and expressions. The installation was developed between 2011 and 2016; wwwalrus, its browser version, continues the project from 2026.

Celebra is an interactive installation, originally commissioned by the Uruguayan government as part of the celebrations of Uruguay's 200th anniversary. It is a massive interactive installation that can also operate as an audiovisual performance tool.

NEXO was a research project of the Laboratorio de Medios at UDELAR, in collaboration with UDELAR's Centro de Investigación Básica en Psicología.

Nibia is an interactive installation that questions the relationship between society and its recent past, through the recontextualisation of a particular image.

YARMI began as an augmented-reality musical instrument in which tracked physical objects could be used to construct and manipulate musical relationships. It was documented at NIME 2009 and revisited in A New Iteration of YARMI.

Critical Point is written for solo cello and an interactive computer-music system with two-to-four-channel sound and computer animation. The cellist plays from a score, while the computer records and transforms the cello sounds in various ways. Graphics and video are also projected. The computer-generated graphics are affected by audio from the live cellist. Critical Point was written in memory of the artist Rob Fisher.

Ribbons is a real-time visual instrument created for maximising the expressiveness of the performer within its aesthetic paradigm. Its design questions the basic assumption of a flat rectangle as image space by presenting a virtual three-dimensional space where the footage can be projected and deconstructed, thus adding a new dimension of expressiveness orthogonal to traditional narrative.

Puzzling is an interactive artwork developed with Ernesto Rodríguez. Scenes from films are divided into fragments and mapped onto wooden blocks tagged with visual tracking markers. A camera tracks the blocks, while a projection shows the moving images superimposed on them.