Text by CLOT Magazine
Spanish new media artist Jaime de los Ríos is showing a new piece on the digital facade of Etopia in Zaragoza (Spain). Etopia Center for Art & Technology has been conceived as a global centre for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in the digital city. Fundación Zaragoza Ciudad del Conocimiento has redesigned the artistic project for the digital facade of Etopia with the Noctiluca program, which was born with the purpose of completing the curatorial work of this exhibition space that is carried out from the Art and Technology Center.
Noctilucas are small organisms that, when adhering to symbiotic algae and coming into contact with oxygen, cause a flash of bioluminescent light. Flooding the beaches with small blue flecks that give them a heavenly aspect, noctilucas create luminous shows that can be contemplated at nightfall on the tropical coasts. This way, when the sun goes down, Etopia will light up daily to offer a visual spectacle that can be contemplated in the skyline of the west area of Zaragoza, and in which the 16,884 LEDs that make up its digital facade will become electric noctilucas.
The first guest of the Noctiluca program is Jaime de los Ríos, with his work Moving Pictures. With the premise each act of perception is, to some degree, an act of creation and each act of memory is, in a way, an act of imagination, Moving Pictures portrays a system that gives the image the status of a tool of a cultural artefact. This work presents an ironic evolution towards large canvases in the era of algorithmic reproducibility, recalling masterpieces of pictorial expression, worked from an autopoietic computational abstraction of an infinite solution whose materiality comes from a system that expands, collapses and rebalances.
