Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Ph.D., M.Arch., M.F.A., B.Sc., B.A.
Artist Statement
Born in New York City and raised in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area, my life was framed as a son of immigrants from Bogota, Colombia, within the bounds of my youth between a triad of cities that represented Capitalist Wealth, Military Dominance, and Foreign “Otherness” slipping in between the different cultural realities being an orphan trying to decode the American “Hollywood” Dream. I am bearing witness to a main performative impulse for exploration and research motivation.
New Media Architectures (NMA) was conceived as a conceptual framework, a tool for revealing the hidden interconnected complexities of the varied existing human narratives and the spaces that justify controlling people within spaces. My artistic investigation explores the curiosity of experiencing space expressed in the different dynamics and accumulation of power signaled by mediated communication outlets - limiting the possibilities of humanity's evolutionary imagination. All that we can define with language, mathematics, and the grammars that give meaning have currently algorithmized our world's natural systems. This intellectual work was made as a way to formulate new designs for all to feel, hear, and see. A critique of institutionalized power and how it is expressed through the arts, media and sciences are investigated through traditional materials, analogue, and digital media.
As part of the evolution of different bodies of work NMA started from mixed media drawings revealing architectural forms and illustrative autobiographically inspired narratives through the knowledge of papermaking, printmaking, and sculptural methods from Pyramid Atlantic, 501c3. That work soon after inspired a pursuit of intense philosophical investigations of our postmodern concepts of cultural production, definitions of power, and media communications theory within American mass communication frameworks pre and post web 1.0. At CalArts, Installation works that Architecturally engaged media spaces through video performances and the language of cinema, formulated opportunities for loose narrative strategies incorporating acting as an athletic male engaged a larger critique contesting American cultural tropes. A mediated exceptionalism and technological dominance as endurance and control were represented in the final presentation of the works. Analytical qualitative observations and interviews were a part of the process of building knowledge to iterate on future works. A Rigorous Theatrical training and performative training was engaged more fully with a combined architectural and video media technology to formulate a collaboration with About Productions, a 501c3 during and after CalArts.
As a third generation member of a family of builders, I was educated as an architect while focusing on the technological mediums, engaging in the worlds of computational generative virtualized design and animated curvilinear fabricated nurbs forms design-engineered for CNC, laser cutting, robotics, and 3d printing methods for model making and architectural forms/graphics for realworld construction at AUD, UCLA. Creating materiality and the aesthetic spatial qualities of the mediated politics of space was and continues to be an area of investigation through speculative formmaking.
While my artistic practice has been shaped with collaborations as part of the AlloSphere research group and members of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UCSB, I see my research as a series of prototyping possibilities as a tool to inspire a larger cultural global intervention as dialogue for change as experimentation. The next generation of technologies, AI, Metaverse, Quantum computing web 3.0 and the future of a wireless interconnected world for real-time augmented experiences are all a part of a larger mirror to our current state of the world. The contrasting of military technologies as a basis of our shared global history is being contested with existing narrative global mythologies that overlook all the works yet digitized, oral story telling practices, and indigenous wisdom only existing now in physical spaces. Projects such as the Quantum Composition Series and the recently completed Sketches of Sensorium for PST ARt engage spatialized sound, visualized real-time systems, and virtual forms to create multisensory immersive experiences. These installations, exhibited nationally and internationally, challenge both scientific and artistic conventions by merging the art within the science. The communication of quantum mathematics, architectural design, and speculative sculptural spaces as form is embedded in the entire lived ephemeral experience with these bodies of works.
Pivoting to my current investigations using AI tools for artistic and speculative design works along with an algorithmic computational approach, is a part of a continued investigative engagement for a sustained institutional critique. The underlying foundational historical logic and potential of existing technology, enabling new systems of artistic expanded imagination without constraints is being explored. While on this creative path, this process allows a choice that involves philosophical and theoretical analysis, and experimental practices unwrapping existing narratives in the hopes of merging the senses investigating the many cultural phenomena of the human condition.
Storytelling and technological experiments are foundational areas of importance in the work that come from an informed spatial Architectural vocabulary - a non linear composed rhythmic pattern narrative of form. At the heart of my research in this series of group investigations, the question: How can complex systems science, nature, and manmade systems be encapsulated through an artistic practice of New Media Architectures? I use poetic investigative inquiry and hybridized scientific principles to engage with existing systems, proposing ways of understanding the culture of space and information in between. A unification of information as space is explored using the different domains that illustratively express different memory narratives that drive historical and contemporary definitions of space. The speculative arts/design/media spaces created are a part of a larger imagination project, envisioning a reunification between the artists and sciences research as a “Human Right.”
All of my artworks engage all mediums as an exploration of a language of defining spatial forms within a larger sensoral contemporary cultural expression. The conceiving imaginative methods to subvert our current regimes of global Capitalistic controls for societal reinvention, this work explores our multilayered time and value system inherent within an ownership class reengineering new forms of control. This interrogation of our lived sense of an uncertain reality is a form of conceptual art, engaging an impossible search to critique today’s mediated world as data, material, and mathematically calculated with coded probabilities as a speculative option to recodify our senses with artistic prototypes and design proposals.
I see more opportunities that lead to more speculative artistic embodiment of form, by designing immersive spaces as instruments as part of an artistic investigative group practice. The utilization of mixed reality, projectors, and sensors to visualize complex phenomena are the tools of the day and are transforming but the immersive qualities of realtime data as lived experience is still years into the future and is still great territory for continued artistic research. As an artist and research practitioner, I strive to create interdisciplinary learning environments with my collaborators and partners. By also engaging with data as a source material, I design narratively layered opportunities within a virtual world context that explore issues of social justice, equity, and the complexities of our technologically mediated lives. Today, algorithms shape our understanding within the abstract nature of physical reality, mass, and scale; investigating the hidden informational structures existing in this new field.
My work questions the implications for human creativity. Each artwork serves as a critical investigation of history, memory, materiality, and space—challenging canonical thought and envisioning new potentialities for artistic and scientific discovery. Seeing art making as a part of a larger curatorial and exhibition organizing practice, I aim to expand the boundaries of what is possible within the arts and sciences. A merging of a pragmatic and scholarly approach to making is essential to endure the many creative choices revealing the hidden patterns of our daily lives. Following one’s own creative intuitions and impulses are key to finding a continuity of meaning between individualized works and forming rewarding collaborations. The many experiential technological mediums and aesthetic opportunities available, is exciting as a revisiting of traditional mediums in fundamental new ways for deep knowledge research.
An evolution as revolutionary investigative thought engaging the layers of what actually exists, can conceive a new poetic series of directed ideas, gestures, and thoughts for art. The making of opportunities to experience multisensory layered spatialized architectural experiences as a New Media Architectures (NMA) language is how I am navigating my artistic creative research practice. Moreover this artistic practice hopes to inspire new approaches for discovery between the interplay of information, space, and society, critically questioning the limitations of language and human imagination.