PATRICIO GONZALEZ VIVO & JEN LOWE: BLINK
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: Hi Patricio and Jen! Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. To start, could each of you tell us about your backgrounds and how you got started with creative coding?
Patricio González Vivo: When I started in this field it wasn’t called creative coding. We were a bunch of hybrid people, coming from art, design, and engineering, trying to use computer code as an expressive medium. At the time, I was working as a clinical psychologist doing expressive art therapy workshops. I needed a website that reflected the multiple media I was working in: music, painting, sculpting, and contemporary dance. Through making that website I discovered Dan Shiffman’s book, Processing, and OpenFrameworks.
In 2010, in my Interactivos residency at Fundación Telefónica, I got really involved in the community of openFrameworks and started creating interactive installations with it. The next year, during my residency at Centro Cultural Español in Buenos Aires, I really got into shaders, which I consider my happy place.
The project I was working on then was called Efecto Mariposa (Butterfly Effect). Drawing from my art therapy background, I wanted to invite people into states of co-creation and flow. To facilitate that, I incorporated a Jungian technique called a sandbox and made it interactive. I projected a living ecosystem onto the sandbox which included a geosphere, a hydrosphere, a biosphere, and an atmosphere. Using a kinect, I tracked the hands of participants as they interacted with the sand and topography. In order to achieve everything that project technically required, I needed to learn shaders. The biosphere was the most delicate simulation of all, and as the participants interacted with the sandbox, the plants suffered and tended to get destroyed in that process. The work enabled a playful experience, but it also created pause for people to become more aware of how their different interventions in the piece cascaded. It presents a tension between the invitation to intervene and create, with the repercussions that brings. It was an exploration on how to introduce a pause, a moment for contemplation and awareness. I think these are still guiding themes in my work today.
Jen Lowe: My background is in math, computer science, and information science. When I was a kid, my family would say, “Jen is an artist, but we don't really talk about that, ” I was always creative but it was kind of a shameful thing to be in my family of origin, so I leaned into my technical side instead. But I was adding poetry excerpts to my math research papers, so the signs were always there.
In 2011, I was a researcher in a physics lab making visualizations of LiDAR data. I attended the first Eyeo Festival and it really opened my imagination to all these creative possibilities. I went back to the lab and used Daniel Shiffman's book to create particle motion wind visualizations that were well received by the datavis community, and changed the course of my life and career. Creative coding helped me communicate our lab results in a more compelling, visually poetic way.
In 2014, I made an online art piece called One Human Heartbeat using data from a watch heart rate monitor. This tech is ubiquitous now, but in 2014, I had to do web scraping to get the minute-level data from the monitor. I shared my heartbeat online with a visualization of all the days that were theoretically left in the rest of my life. That project was about privacy but also about how we think about time over the course of one person's life.
Working with Patricio is how I got into generative art, and shaders specifically. I think a big part of why we both are interested in shaders is that they let you tap into an infinite, unfolding time space.
The Book of Shaders has been an invaluable resource to so many creative coders and generative artists. What has it been like to see your students and other artists create with the tools you have built?
Patricio González Vivo: When we started writing The Book of Shaders, shaders were the domain of GPU manufacturers or Computer Science PhDs, and I wanted to write about what I’d learned about shaders, to make that information more accessible. I’m always excited whenever I see one of my shaders tools or resources used in a project. I feel we have played an important role in this golden age of generative arts.
Jen Lowe: You never know what you're making or the effect that it’s going to have when you're making it. The book has definitely taken on a life of its own. It's been wild to see the scale of it over time. The Book of Shaders is now available in 12 languages, and every month around 25,000 people from over 150 countries visit the site.
Patricio González Vivo: People have told me, “This has allowed me to have a job.” It always feels great to hear things like this, because Jen and I know what the contribution of Dan Shiffman’s work and other books have meant for us. We met because we are in this field, and we are only in this field because of books like these.
What drives or influences your creative pursuits? Do your professional backgrounds in research and education shape your creative work?
Patricio González Vivo: Jen and I share a strong curiosity about fundamental concepts like time, space, awareness, presence, and interpersonal relationships. Jen is excellent at reading patterns, especially ones that are so large-scale that they become invisible to the majority of people. Growing up in the desert has given her a distinct perspective on geological time and space which she incorporates and magnifies. This steers our work towards the realms of quantum mechanics, migratory patterns, and probabilistic models.
I learn through code, so if I’m interested in stars, I learn astronomy by creating an astronomic engine in C++. I learn about light by playing with shaders. I learn about cartography by making 3d maps. This tinkering practice drives my creative pursuits.
We are constantly thinking about the future of humankind. Jen always says we are the ancestors of distant future generations, and this idea creates a particular relationship between ourselves and time. Our work in education is a natural consequence of looking at this very long temporal horizon, of seeing ourselves in a dialogue through time with the future.
Jen Lowe: Growing up in the Sonoran desert in Tucson, Arizona, is the main creative influence of my life. It’s a really special place in the US that’s surrounded by mountains. It’s where the DarkSky movement was founded, so it’s a city where you can still see the Milky Way. Growing up with these mountains and being able to see the stars, you get this real sense of smallness in the universe. That sense of smallness and scale has stayed with me, and it's something Patricio and I have in common that influences our creative work.
In terms of education, I used to teach in high schools in Tucson with students who had interrupted educations. These kids were brilliant, but because of structural inequality in the US, they were often not able to go to college. Since then I’ve been interested in making education available outside of academic institutions. That's the drive behind co-founding the School for Poetic Computation, keeping The Book of Shaders openly available, and keeping course costs low.
Your question was also about research. Research and deep listening are the fundamental ways through which I understand the world. Whether I'm doing research in a lab or in my day to day, I always have a connection network in my brain of ideas, themes, people, and how everything we do fits into that map. Research is like air for me.
You have worked on several projects together, including this one with Bright Moments. Can you walk us through what your collaborative creative process looks like?
Jen Lowe: It's been fun working on this project for Bright Moments because we've really made a process of seamlessly working together. The gift of collaboration is that we're both bringing different skills, abilities, and ways of being in the world. We get to be more prismatic when we work together than we would be if it was just one of us. It lets us play to our strengths.
Patricio is extremely prolific and constantly making things. He's made this whole suite of tools so that we can iterate any idea we have super quickly. What I do is work around that, so I'm working at the large-scale conceptual level, as well as the small-scale fine tuning level. The large scale involves research to formulate what the work is about and how it relates to the world. The small scale involves working on the specific values for each parameter, like determining the range of colors, speed, and opacity.
Because of my background in data visualization and math, I'm really interested in outliers. For generative art, I really want to take the work to the outlier edge between what is attractive and what is weird. I want to make you feel something outside of what you might experience in your day-to-day life. For me, creating that uncanny experience happens at both the conceptual level and the fine-tuning detail level.
Patricio González Vivo: We both have technical skills. Jen works with Python and data pipelines, and it helps that we both code. I am excited by novelty, technical challenges, setting up infrastructure, iterating, and exploring different visual concepts or nailing down a visual look. I don’t necessarily go into the fine-tuning the way that Jen does. We know each other very well—we know our strengths and what we enjoy, so we move very fluidly. It's almost a natural and physical experience, like a dance. We take turns: she leads one moment and then I lead the next.
That’s amazing. I can't wait to hear about what you have to share about your project for Buenos Aires! Could you tell us more about what you have been working on?
Patricio González Vivo: The initial idea came from Baroque-era vanitas paintings. These chiaroscuro style paintings contain symbolic references to the ephemeral and temporal—unfinished books, empty glasses, candles, skulls, and butterflies. I find this rich symbology fascinating. During the Renaissance, painters were able to play with transparency and texture due to advancements in oil paint. This led to a deep interest in reproducing reality with unparalleled accuracy. The Baroque period that followed added a dimension of symbolic imperfection and meaning. I found many parallels between the world of computer graphics and Renaissance art, as they both share this drive towards perfection and realism. I wanted to play with this realism and incorporate Baroque symbolism.
Jen and I drew on my initial work around that idea for this project. We decided to focus on one symbolic element from the vanitas paintings that really captures a sense of ephemerality and fragility—bubbles. Sometimes in a vanitas painting you’ll see a skull with a bubble floating above it, and it feels somewhat out of place. It actually brings back memories of my childhood in Buenos Aires. I remember waiting for the bus to school, seeing the beautiful rainbow patterns that appeared on puddles in the streets. Similar to a bubble in a vanitas painting, I got this uncanny feeling from seeing something so beautiful just there in a puddle on the street.
In order to recreate the mesmerizing patterns you see on bubbles with code, I needed to explore a natural phenomenon called “thin-film interference.” This effect is produced by the interaction of light with two mediums. This first medium has to be a layer of film so thin that some light waves are able to go through it and bounce off of the second medium. When light waves are reflected this way, they interfere with each other, and create the patterns on the thin film’s surface. This occurs with oil on water, and in the case of bubbles, between air on the inside and the outside. I went deep to figure out how to simulate that effect properly, so it can evoke a sense of wonder and trigger memories people can relate to when they see it.
In this artwork, the minted composition is unique, but the simulation on top of it is ephemeral and constantly evolving. In all our artwork, time and space are important elements, so we are conscious of frame rates and making sure that the work can play in real time.
Jen Lowe: Bubbles are where joy and ephemerality overlap, and we wanted to evoke this childlike sense of joy people have with them. We're showing the bubble at such a large scale that it also becomes kind of planetary, so we're playing with time and scale here as well. The original title was In Ictu Oculi, which is the title of a painting by Spanish Baroque artist Juan de Valdés Leal. It's a Latin phrase meaning “in the blink of an eye.” We distilled this title down to BLINK.
What does it mean for you to be showcasing your work in Buenos Aires?
Patricio González Vivo: I'm really excited to be showing our work alongside fantastic Latin American artists and friends. Latin America is the home of magical realism, and we bring a unique and necessary vision to the art world. I'm very happy that Bright Moments has chosen to shine a light on our community.
Buenos Aires has a long history of generative art, digital art, and optical art. Bright Moments in Argentina is like seeing an echo of other moments of time. There was a time where the Guggenheim and the Di Tella were in dialogue, and a lot of Argentinian artists then were traveling, and were active parts of this big global art world. It's nice to see these flows expanding.
Jen Lowe: It’s just a real joy to see Latin American generative art showcased. It's going to be sweet to show our work with Patricio in his hometown.
