As the digital space undergoes rapid evolution, the world of NFTs has received significant attention, both due to the innovative nature of its associated technologies and as a result of liquidity being extracted through various trends.
However, for artists like Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez, it’s not about jumping on the bandwagon; instead, it’s a continuation of a journey that began in the early 1990s. Coding on a 386 PC, experimenting with the earliest versions of tools like Macromedia Flash, and delving into musical composition, Soria-Rodriguez’s technological odyssey was rich and diverse.
Each week, nft now’s Next Up reveals a new artist from our curated list of emerging talents who have made significant waves within Web3. This week we are happy with Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez.
Marcelo Soria Rodriguez
From his first encounters with generative algorithms to his fascinating exploration of the interplay between human emotions and machine logic, his story is a testament to innovation, passion and the timeless appeal of art.
In an exclusive interview with nft now, Soria-Rodriguez reveals his captivating journey into the world of NFTs, the philosophy behind his art and the sources of his inspiration. His perspective offers a deep dive into the nuances of digital ownership, the power of generative techniques and the limitless potential that arises when art, emotion and technology collide. Dive in as we traverse the digital world of an artist who believes that “art lives within emotion and reaction.”
gm // system B pic.twitter.com/tRcVSXZXQb
— Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez (@msoriaro) August 2, 2023
To better understand the artist and his works, we had the opportunity to sit down with Marcelo to ask a few questions about his journey.
nft now: How did you first become interested in/involved in NFTs?
Soria Rodriguez: In late 2020, I was first introduced to NFTs as a way to enable digital ownership and provenance, and decided to give it a try as a way to get the works I’ve coded over the past few months into the world.
I’ve been creating with computers since the early 1990s: 3D renderings with POV Ray in a 386 PC with a coprocessor, interactive visual works with the early versions of Macromedia Flash, algorithmic works with Matlab (the tool I used during my technical university courses), musical compositions with my first sound card (Ad Lib!) and then a highly regarded Roland SCC-1 with now defunct software like Cakewalk… I devoted my professional career to innovation and strategy and at one point in 2017-2018 I started coding again to create works that had no productive purpose, using Python at the time.
Then, in the lockdown evenings of April-May 2020, I needed to find an escape from some personal matters going on at the time and started coding and processing what eventually became my Art Blocks Curated release, Entretiempos. . When I heard about NFTs in late 2020, I decided to market my work to see if it would pass the test of the public, and it started to do well.
I believe the emergence of provable digital ownership has real potential for structural change in society. As such, the most relevant initiatives won’t cause a stir in the near term, but hopefully within a few years we’ll look back and see steady, gradual, real changes taking place. Art is an excellent tool to explore new structures and a way to bring new mechanisms to a wider audience. However, we need more education around it to see some of its potential realized.
To me, the relevant part is usually not the NFT itself, which in the vast majority of cases is only used for provenance and proof of ownership, but the art, content, or use case.
Marcelo Soria Rodriguez
nft nu: How would you describe your art?
Soria-Rodriguez: Most of my work has been done using generative techniques, and more specifically my own hand-coded generative algorithms, although I’ve done some small things with generative AI as well.
I find generative techniques fascinating: they allow you to explore much further than you would in your lifetime using other artistic tools alone. I find it a very useful technique to explore one of the interests I have, which is exploring the role of emotions in human-machine societies and the change we see as synthetic beings interacting with us and nature come. I believe that contact with entities that display behaviors similar to intelligent actions will help us re-evaluate our role in life and our own nature, our relationships with our environment, etc.
Generative art is perfectly positioned to explore these new relationships, process certain things in ‘machine logic’ and imbue them with human emotions. My body of work traverses these subjects and explores various questions that arise in that space. Because I mainly work with digital media, I also find it very interesting to explore the possibilities that come with it.
I like to think about the concept of the total cognitive space of any medium (the total space of possibilities that any system can yield in theory and in practice, given its degree of freedom and structure, a concept I came across some time ago wrote an article about ), and digital has an overlap of possibilities with physical media which I take as a starting point, mostly going in directions that can be more fully explored in digital media (interactivity, evolution, endless animation, etc.).
nft now: what does your process look like? And where do you usually find inspiration?
Soria Rodriguez: I find inspiration in many different things. I like to observe my surroundings and dwell on what I see or how I react to the sensory input that surrounds me. It could be a piece of music, it could be a streak of light on a wall, it could be the dancing shadow of a tree’s leaves. It could be a natural disaster or a human catastrophe.
Everything can provoke an emotion and a reaction, and art lives within emotion and reaction.
Marcelo Soria Rodriguez
Sometimes I want to express something specific, sometimes I want to create something that moves me in the hope that it will touch others. Sometimes I’m just developing some thoughts and a work emerges from that. Usually I come to an idea through those different ways of inspiration, and then I usually work with code to play with initial concepts and try to understand how the medium will shape the concept and what trade-offs might exist between them.
Normally I spend a lot of time acquiring new skills while creating a new work. I’m an expert in none of these, but I like the idea that the final work shows all the imperfections of my imperfect technique. I am not looking for technical perfection in my work, my work is not about that, but I am constantly trying to improve and learn.
In addition to the subject of the artwork, I get inspiration from everything that touches me in one way or another. Music is very important to me, but I am rarely able to translate the whole emotional intensity of music into a still work or a silent work.
Movement and dynamics are, in my opinion, very important to allow emotions and reactions to grow. We exist in time, and we change entities: we are not still beings, and our emotions are pure movement. That’s why I find music so powerful, or the dancing shadows I talked about. The light changed throughout the afternoon. But movement can also be silent. Color contrast, color play, form contrast, etc. Life has a very diverse palette of elements to become interesting, and I try to learn from that.