above/beneath all & all above/beneath

Let me talk a bit about "above/beneath all & all above/beneath", my latest work, and other thoughts around it. This is a piece about the human condition, about how it does prevail under the stress of illness. I have worked on it after being invited by Alex Estorick to be part of the digital section of Cure³ at Bonhams, curated by Alex and Foteini Valeonti of reGEN and supported by fxhash. Cure³ is an fundraising event to support research into a cure for Parkinson's disease.

(From the Cure³ website:) Parkinson’s is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world. The underlying symptoms of Parkinson’s are treated with a range of medication, but currently none of these slow, stop or reverse the progression of the disease.

I already took part in the 2023 edition of Cure³ with "all that remains / all that, remains / all, that remains", raising an amount that equaled the cost of 1-2 clinical trials. When I was invited to this year's, I couldn't but accept hoping to add my grain of sand to funding research once more. My grandfather had Parkinson's, over 10 million people suffer the illness globally and it touches many families.

There are a number of overarching themes in this work. The connection to illness is a strong component, as illness has struck my family in many occasions and I have tried to find ways to be of as much help as possible. Then there is a supporting layer which is understanding, or rather questioning or exploring, what it means to be human. With the advent of synthetic beings that exhibit certain cognitive capabilities, which is our role in our own life and how do we re-define ourselves? What we though exclusive to human or other animals (and perhaps by extension many other living beings) might also appear in complex, man-originated, non-biological entities. Even illness will eventually appear in whatever advanced AIs or other artificial beings enter into our society. Finally, there is a search for emotion, a raw response to a stimulus. To have generative techniques present us with an infinite stream of an approximation to the human figure in various, endless arrangements is a way to search for what moves us in the memory of ourselves when facing images of us all. Maybe even get closer to what underpins us as human as opposed to other species, artificial or not.

Technically it's an evolution of a technique that I have always used to investigate this line of the human and the emotion in various ways (the first time in Lo que no está, a work for Bright Moments Mexico City collection, after that in my 1st work for Cure3, then in Vida y sombra y luz y muerte, a very personal piece about the Mediterranean sea from where I come from and the difficulties around immigration). In the case of this project I have tried to use the technique in combination with simple depictions of people being subject to various forms of abstraction, aiming to represent the vary many ways that we are all different to other people and to ourselves in time, and the very many ways that we are all the same as well.

My approach was somehow a continuation of the work I did back in 2023. Back then I depicted a metaphor for a head, with two possible ways of looking into it: a "clean" representation, or one affected by some forms of distortion, where artifacts appeared around the representation of the head.

From there, I wanted to improve on the emotions that the piece could convey. I am interested in how a synthetic, digital creation, cold in its nature, can evoke warm feelings in a sentient being (human, for now). Also, given the theme of the piece, I found it vital to improve on this aspect.

I had been working with different representations of heads, simple depictions that deliberately avoided trying to be realistic, focusing instead on an emotion of head. Basically a sphere stretched here and there, with a distorted surface.

This direction was interesting (and I used it to produce identity space through light and three layers: a digital/analog study, 2024, an experimental physical artwork for Kate Vass' INTERTHINKING show at Budapest, 2024-10 – 2025-01). Still, I felt it was too close to the work from 2023, and also lacked in raw emotion.

I went on to play with a simple depiction of a human body. Schematic, to stay close to a metaphor of human. Head, neck, body, arms, hands, waist, legs with knees, feet. Joints that could rotate.

I use SDF (signed distance functions) to mathematically define the human bodies, then raymarching to draw the scene. There are many resources online to learn more about SDFs, in case you are not familiar and would like to learn more I would recommend Iñigo Quilez's beyond-excellent articles on the topic. About raymarching, basically it's a technique where one draws rays of "vision" from the camera (the viewer's standpoint) to the world being represented, moving along the ray until an object is found. But I don't like the look of clean rendered images: too cold, too uninteresting. Nothing human, or emotional, there. So I decided to apply several tricks I've been experimenting with for some time.

To start with, meddle with the mathematical definition that the SDF returns. We are not perfect renderings of our genetic code, so a digital representation of self should echo this condition. Adding certain random distortions to surfaces is a way to bring the difficulties in life to the perfect machine world. Then I experimented with other tricks that have to do directly with symptoms that Parkinson's patients typically have. The difficulty in movement that they suffer from is evoked in the work through altering the space itself. Space is somewhat distorted in the piece, causing shapes to follow the logics of the distortion.

Also, I make the space arbitrarily non-linear: that is, I alter the distances and volume and quantize it, such that when you travel from point x to y you don't advance in smooth steps, but rather in large increments that create 3d pixel-like effects in the outputs. Reality may feel broken when you can't move swiftly around. I also started tinkering with how one traverses the "vision rays", altering the way a normal raymarching mechanism works, producing jittery images.

I started adding more humans to the mix. Groups of people in situations that seemed to me moments of communion, either grief or celebration. This might be something we humans can identify with: sharing a feeling with a group of our same species?

There are phases in the development of a generative art work that involve iterating over minute changes in parameters almost fanatically. With minor changes come large outcome changes (think that a single genetic mutation can alter the course of one human too). I spent quite some time producing outputs from variations of the code, searching for human emotion. I went through several phases that seemed powerful to me, but maybe limited for the scope of an artwork that I want to be able to produce hundreds of images that explore wide and far. Some of the very many images produced, with quantized space, distortions and so on:

These all brought me memories of TV music shows from the late 70s / early 80s. A very kind memory to me, yet lacking in intensity. I wanted to portray something stronger. When your world has suddenly new limitations, when the laws of physics you know no longer are valid. So I kept iterating.

There is one parameter in the raymarching technique which is, let's say, the "patience" you allow each search along a view ray to find an object. As you move along the ray, from the camera to the scene (one ray in every possible direction), you keep going according to certain parameters until you find an object. But you can decide how many steps you are willing to go along each ray before you find something. Playing with that, limiting this parameter in differing ways, started giving me an interesting halo around the characters. Also, I started adapting the work to a progressive paint approach: as it was originally programmed, it would halt or crash most computer systems trying to reproduce it. The progressive approach took two ways: rendering lower resolutions first, then progressively increase resolution, and also paint the image line by line instead of trying to paint it all at once. This brought along more interesting effects where some of the lower detail that was a consequence of the initial draw passes would make it to the final image, adding touches of blur / indetermination that were quite interesting. Who is not confused at times in their life? Do we see at full resolution over our lives? No, we also perceive progressively. We can't grasp our reality all at once. Maybe the fact that I had to do it that way is rooted in the same principle, no matter if we are talking about biological or synthetic beings. Maybe any attempt at "seeing" can only be progressive and partial.

I decided also to draw a number of concentric polygons distributed according to certain rules, and use that to various uses in the final image. These image would provide a background, would act as a source for distortion and some other things. In the images above, on the right, the polygons look like they are shining light over the people. But they also act as a field of stars, a compendium of dreams, thoughts, wishes: a reason to live for.

Still, the composition felt a bit too regular. I added two elements to try to help with this. A way to generate terrain, not to have these humans floating in empty space or living on a flat surface, as they had been so far, and a sphere that would appear every now and then, a representation of "the source", our origin, the beginning which walks along us until we go. I finally decided to remove these elements as they created certain technical problems, and also I wanted to center all the attention in the human figures. Still, looking back at some of the development stills, I miss them somehow. Something to come back to at some point.

I still felt that the final result was not what I was looking for. One of the things I don't always like about using raymarching + SDFs is that simulating light ends up casting a 3D scene that is too... er... 3D. From there, if you want to follow the realism path you need to go very deep into it to get a pretty bad attempt at realistic rendering (with limited code size that is parametric and runs on your browser, as compared to, for example, animated feature films realism). Or you can try to be more abstract (which is what I typically do). But I couldn't be purely abstract: I wanted my humans there. So I started experimenting with altering even more the process of simulating light and raymarching. I started creating flat images from the same mathematically defined scene, discarding depth data and focusing only on the presence of forms from the standpoint of the camera. And this started to bring me closer to something I could then follow.

Then it was all a matter of combining the progressive rendering, the flat style plus some depth, colours, how the textures were affecting the composition and, well, a host of many little things that I had to tweak in every possible component that made the artwork. Adding colour to the humans, letting them have different hues on each side of their bodies (a nod to Malevich's Спотрсмены - Sportsmen, since my schematic humans reminded me sometimes of the way he had to represent these figures from his neo-suprematist standpoint). One must always face lots of decisions: since I was able to create X, should I keep it for the final work? What should I do with variable pixelation in the final output? Do I add this many palettes? What about the rules to compose the positions of the humans? How to make it run faster? Oh no, it does not work on browser Z or device Y...

I thought I had finished in many occasions, only to lose advances in code, or change my mind, or find new problems as I check and test. But always trying to keep focus on: what story am I trying to tell? What should make this work stand out? How will it connect to people? Is it about the fancy flat style that I achieved? The cool variable spatial resolution, the dissolving of the humans? Being clever with technical tricks? Having nice palettes? Is it about telling the story of an illness? Of the people who have it? What is this about?

The raw emotion. It has to be. Otherwise I don't care for any of the advances I made in my practice. This is what guided my slashing of options, features, fancy bells and whistles. All out, unless they drive me to feeling something. Which is why I went with heavy distortion coming from the textures, letting lots of colour outputs which are (sometimes) strong in message, having probably too many ethereal outputs... but maybe all these help the artwork connect with someone who would experience it. Generative techniques have this power to present the idea of the artist in varying degrees of departure from what could be a unique way of seeing things. All humans are equal, all are unique. The different ways of generative to produce outputs from the same system of ideas that the artist is producing is a way to help more people approach the work and let it talk to them. And this is how the final system came to be:

Throughout the process of creating this artwork I kept thinking about "A Giacometti Portrait" by James Lord, a book he wrote about a portrait Giacometti painted of him. He went on to explain how Giacometti would redo the head over and over again, always musing that the work was going nowhere, then after much work Alberto would say that they were now getting something to work with, only to destroy it and redo it and redraw obsessively. This is how this work has felt. I wonder if there is any other way to work when you try to express emotion. Emotion is an elusive entity. A class of existence on its own. Trying to reach for it through an artwork is a humbling task, yet immensely rewarding because of the journey itself, even if not for a conclusive result. There is no conclusive result in life.

That elusive entity happens to be at the very basement of our existence. The number one element that guides our actions. Emotion is surely, then, a necessary fabric of our human life. Illness or not, emotions stay in place as a burning flame that constitutes our most inner self. Being human is not taken from us no matter the conditions. Being human prevails above and beneath all other things, being human is all there is above and beneath the frontier of oneself.