JUAN PEDRO VALLEJO: SUBTRACTION RECONFIGURATION
Part of a series of articles & interviews released digitally that were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at Bright Moments Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2023.
Bright Moments: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Juan! How did you get started in the field of generative art? What initially drew you in, and how do you translate that into your work?
Juan Pedro: I started programming quite late in life. I had some prior knowledge because my dad taught me how to use ActionScript when I was a kid. Later on I studied film and realized that the filmmaking process is very long and tedious. I felt the need for more immediacy and to have a closer connection between the ideas in my head and the work I create.
When I got a computer, I started programming but didn't start creating generative art right away. I began programming to create real-time images. I created a program called “Fragma” which I built in openFrameworks with a UI for working with images in real-time in a three-dimensional environment. You can place objects in Fragma, modify them, and make them move. You can also access the code without needing to recompile, especially when working with shaders.
While I was aware of generative art at the time, it wasn't a field that interested me. I underwent a paradigmatic shift after visiting Julio Le Parc's retrospective exhibition in Argentina at the Centro Cultural Kirchner. It was a huge exhibition spanning three floors showcasing all his work, from objects and mobiles to paintings, even works he had created in virtual reality.
Since I had studied film, one of my primary areas of interest was the movement of things. This naturally drew me to kinetic art, where movement is the raw and constitutive material. When we talk about movement, we're also talking about ideas in motion, different ways of thinking, and various ways of approaching artistic practice.
While studying kinetic artists like Julio Le Parc and Carlos Cruz-Diez, I realized their artistic approaches and processes were closely aligned with the algorithmic and the generative. As they were working in the 1950s, these artists had fine arts backgrounds instead of computational or electronic art backgrounds. They imagined these huge algorithmic systems which they then executed by hand. As analog artists, it was impossible for them to achieve what feels very natural in our daily lives as generative artists today, which is to have 100 or even 1,000 outputs at the click of a button.
I reached the conclusion that generative art is a broad field encompassing different aesthetics. When we talk about generative art, it's not about defining a particular aesthetic but about a way of doing things and approaching artistic practice. I feel more like a kinetic artist than a generative artist because the generative is part of the kinetic.
wing time with conversation, thinking that people wouldn't want to stand there and watch the machine work for that long. However, I didn't need to do that, as people really enjoyed watching the machine create their portraits.
In your body of work, one interesting concept you’ve worked with is the idea of "Pure Visibility". Can you elaborate on this concept and what it means to you?
The idea of "Pure Visibility" or "Visibilidad Pura" arises from a kind of rebellion I started to feel regarding what art should be. Obviously, there are countless definitions of art, and aiming for universal and totalizing concepts would be a fallacy. However, in the collective imagination there exists an idea that art is closely tied to the emotional realm.
This is much more apparent in music, where it seems that in practice, the goal is to express something visceral, emotional, and spontaneous. This idea of positioning the artist as a channel through which emotions flow strikes me as a somewhat archaic and overly romantic notion that removes the artist's perspective from what they are doing. When the artist is solely the person who conveys an emotion, it diminishes the value of their artistic practice.
I arrived at this concept of "Pure Visibility" to counteract this perspective on art and the artist and connect it with something that I consider central. Drawing on the ideas of kinetic artists, experience takes precedence over the meaning of things. Obviously, things carry meaning, but working with meaning organically is very difficult. Meaning is part of subjectivity, and in the realms of other people’s subjectivities, the artist has little control. In contrast, the artist can propose experiences. This is what kinetic artists did.
The idea of "Pure Visibility" expresses this notion that there's nothing more than what you see, and you shouldn't look for more. You shouldn't seek a concept. You shouldn't seek a meaning. It's all there in plain sight. This means that the procedures and processes through which the artist carries out a work are all there, right in front of you. You can experience them and perceive them, especially in elements like color, which are often associated with emotions. So, the artist may choose to work with certain cool or warm tones to evoke certain emotions. This is often seen in film, for instance, where color is linked to emotions. This isn't arbitrary; it's based on associations that have been built in different cultures over time, forming conventions. This approach to color choice based on emotional conventions allows you to work with color as a material element, subject to organization and any kind of process.
In your Art Blocks project Interferencias, you mentioned that you were implementing color theories from Latin American kinetic artists and described how these color theories affect your work. Can you dive into how you incorporate this into your creative process?
Fundamentally, cinema is about movement and light. I studied light from a cinematographic perspective with an understanding that light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, where color is essentially light frequencies. When I studied artists like Le Parc, Cruz-Diez, or Bauhaus, especially through Josef Albers' book The Relativity of Color, I discovered that color is, in reality, a relative phenomenon. Relativity, in this case, implies movement; which means that color is in motion. This spectacular perspective takes you out of the rigidity of understanding color based on meaning, and allows you to overlay different colors and make them feel different. Upon studying this, I realized its infinite potential. I'm still working on it, and I'm far from achieving the synthesis I'd like because it's very complex. You'll always find an approach to color in my work that's clean and pure. You won't see me randomly adding colors in many places. There will always be a guiding line, and color always has a place as an element, not an addition.
Le Parc's work is similar to Albers’ in that he worked on color by organizing it. He proposed a color palette, and then he moved the parts around in an algorithmic manner. For instance, he proposed an initial range of 14 colors and then arranged them in different ways. Le Parc primarily painted concentric circles, which made the experience of color more impactful due to the nature of the form. He calculated that manually painting all those variations could take him 100 years. I realized that Le Parc's color palette could easily be expanded by adding more colors to it. You can start with more primitive colors and generate new palettes. That's what I did in Interferencias. It was completely exploratory and educational for me. It was a process of discovering color as an artistic form or artistic expression that can be very profound.
I'm against randomly using colors, no matter how beautiful they may look. Beauty resides elsewhere. We all like to be impressed by a work of art, but sometimes art is also a form of thought. I use it as a form of catharsis; I create something and spend a lot of time looking at it and thinking about why it works the way it does. I think that understanding art in this way reconnects it more with what resonates with me, which is seeing it as a way of thinking.
What would you like to share about your upcoming work for Bright Moments Buenos Aires? Where did the inspiration for this collection come from?
My works are generally very simple and typically involve displacement. This is what I did in Interferencias: taking a circle and starting to move it, generating movement, rhythm, and change.
For this Bright Moments project, I'm working on the idea of subtraction. I start with the shape of a square or a circle, and look to intercede it with other shapes and create different visual configurations.
One of my main references for this work is Armin Hofmann, a well-known graphic designer. When I was creating Interferencias, I felt drawn to him as well. When you see something by Hofmann, you immediately understand what's happening. I'm interested in capturing a certain dynamism or present visually unstable situations that create a complex visual journey. Armin Hofmann’s work is much cleaner and leans more towards design—like Ringers which is also inspired by Hofmann’s work. I'm trying to combine these two aspects, aiming to balance the neatness of the form and this idea of subtraction, with slightly more disturbing or unstable elements.
One of the things I'm interested in working on in this exhibition is the concept of the material. I believe the “physical versus digital” debate isn't really a discussion to be had because the digital is also a form of the material. When you touch a screen, that's a material experience. That's why the concept of "ON CHAIN, OFFLINE" was fascinating because it made me think about the expressive media of the digital. Returning to this idea of the tactile, what interested me was working with paper, ink, and texture, creating a work that you can have in front of you, and feel with your hands and your eyes.
I'm very synesthetic in that sense. I often feel that the senses overlap. These aren't real sensations, they're associations you make. You often draw connections with other artforms and senses. I think touch often takes a back seat, but it's very important. I discovered this when working with an industrial designer from Argentina named Patricia Lascano, one of the best in the country and in Latin America. She works a lot with the tactile and touching one of her plates or tables is a unique experience. It's not just about the wood or the object; it's about the sensation and its arrangement in the senses. I find that fascinating.
Given that Bright Moments is also characterized by in-person minting experiences, what kind of impact do you think an event like Bright Moments could have on Argentina’s local scene of digital creators?
I believe the arrival of Bright Moments is incredibly positive because, in Argentina, there's a large community of generative artists and programmers that has existed for a long time. I don't consider myself a programmer or a generative artist, even though I do both. I also understand that there are people here who have been working with Processing and programming for a long time. NFTs are also a very novel artform, I'm not sure if at any point in art history, there's been this concept where an artist produces 100, 200, 500, or 1,000 variations on the same theme. I think it's a significant change in the way art is produced and understood, and it will take us a long time to digest and comprehend it.
What Bright Moments is doing worldwide is fascinating because it promotes community interaction. They're artistic events that I find very interesting in how they bridge the gap between a traditional art exhibition or gallery setting, and events where there’s music and people socializing. I think it's very healthy to have an event like this because it helps redefine what we know. There’s a saying I've been using a lot lately: I'm against interpretation. I'm in favor of reinterpretation.
We're in an era where the most interesting things are redefinitions, not definitions. The era of definitions has passed in the history of art and culture. I believe this is a positive shift as it is opening things up to different interpretations.
Coming back to Bright Moments, I think even the choice of location is unique. The Palacio Guerrico is a huge place, it looks like a Stanley Kubrick movie set. It's a location that offers various visual settings and lighting conditions. Sometimes when you see a place like this, you think, "How can an art exhibition work here?" For instance, the challenge with this location is that you can't touch the walls. There’s a strong symbolism here. Holding an art exhibition in a place where you can't touch the walls from the beginning breaks the traditional order of things.
