Most recent samples of my personal Instagram account. For the most part, these works are a way of documenting my creative process.
Selected works
My creative practice revolves around the basic building blocks of digital media: the character, the sample, the pixel. I regard these works not for what they are but for how they came to be. For me, the process is the product.
Light paintings
Sequential image fragments displayed in a mobile device as animated GIFs, captured and rebuilt through a long exposition photography app (Slow Shutter).
The Dancers
An homage to early animation and a personal reflection on the COVID lockdowns. The dancers is based on “A couple waltzing”, a zoopraxiscope by Eadweard Muybridge.
The Dancers
Animated Graphic Interface Format (GIF)
The GIF is the work. The source material. The Dancers are consistent and stable but their dance is too slow for our eyes. You can capture their dance but then it becomes erratic and capricious.
That’s the trade-off.
Textilite
A variation on light drawing, Textilite (light weaving) is about creating holograms of Huastec embroideries in public locations in Vancouver. Textilite is a text about migration and ephemerality. All of the patterns for the embroideries are based on the work of Tenek artists, collected and published by Mexican educator Leona Santos Concepción in the book Iconografía Tének. This project was developed in collaboration with Diana Ortiz.
Tenek 2
Animated Graphic Interface Format (GIF)
The patterns rest within these shapes, they are visible but not observable.
Print Music
The result of years of experimentation with glitch art practices (especially data-bending), Print Music is a series of exercises in transmediation between audio and visual raw digital signal. Print Music is an attempt to respond to John Whitney’s challenge to create art for the eye and the ear by ‘taming the glitch’ and overlooking some of the typical Western musical canons.
The foundation of Print Music was laid out in Raw Harmonies (https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01635)
Audio
This is what these data sound like. Each of these pieces was produced using standard scales defined not by Western musical canon but mathematical relationships between each note’s frequency and the length of the entire piece.
Still images
This is what these data look like. Each of these pieces was produced by visualizing the same raw data used to produce the audio pieces displayed above. My only intervention is the use of colour to emphasize particular passages and artifacts encountered during the audio production.
Video
This is what these data look and sound like. The visual and aural versions of the same data run concurrently through the screen window. The visuals seem to react to the sounds and the sounds to the visuals.
Pixel Works
An ongoing study of the optical affordances of pixels. An attempt to re-visibilize the minimum unit of digital imagery, not just as a component but as a protagonist.
Griddles
Transparency is in the eye of the beholder. A project heavily informed by remix culture. Using a simple grid technique, multiple images can be both layered together and isolated.
X-ray bubble
Images sourced from
Livre d’Or de la Santé (1903)
Broken GIFs
First came the film, then came the GIF. A “classic” remix project, the purpose of Broken GIFs is to take animated GIFs specifically created from films and freeze them by exploding their frames to maintain their kineticism.
