Falco: the Art of Losing Control

Falco is an argentinian visual artist and interactive designer who is interested in the use of data as raw material and the reinterpretation of it. As human beings, our first production worldwide is data. As visual artist, I found generative art as a gateway to study data-driven semi-autonomous behaviors in real time. I write images that try to reflect what our virtual identities left on the web. I also do interactive installations and data visualizations as an approach to study its intervention in the space where different technologies and languages converge.

I’ve found in art a passageway to make the question bigger and bigger. I think there are questions that are not meant to be answered, but to tear down the answers that one had installed. In that sense, I don’t think I have many things to say, but rather to ask myself. This is why I seek to get out of the zone of control and I don’t idealize me as creator who shapes matter in the image and likeness of the creative idea.

My work is deeply touched by generative systems and algorithms. They allow me to find another way to approach the creation method. This doesn’t mean that there is no algorithmic art or generative art beyond a computer or vice versa. Just look at the work of Sol Lewitt.

But it’s an attitude that tries to open the black box that tools are and start a dialogue.

As I come from a design background, I always try to establish communication between the system. That’s why I understand the interface as a tool that connects what we’ve called real world and digital world. 

The first step is always to design a system. A network of elements that intertwine with each other, eluding any idea of ​​hierarchy. Each counts as one, but is part of a multiplicity.

The seemingly finished system now has a life of its own and is on its way. They are pixels which have a life, a speed, a direction and draw their path like all our virtual identities that lie floating on the blockchain or the web. Leave a path and that will become history.

I like wondering if I contemplate the system’s results as a daydreamer that looks at the clouds trying to make sense of it. At the end of the day, we all know it doesn’t make any sense. But I think that’s part of being an artist: keeping yourself searching.

I do a lot of research on different libraries, web API, sounds and images. I spend a lot of time selecting and ordering data sets and algorithmic functions. I process the data as color values, so RGB represents the XYZ values of an apparent 3D space. Imagine this with a million pixels with different color values and different possible positions. I always start from one source and handle the information through a feedback system.

It is interesting how complex algorithms appear to be random, but they are not, since the generative system is “alive” and the agents follow one of the possible paths. For me all this is a great metaphor in which everything has already been said. When I thinnk it might be done, the result is nothing more than an unfair cut at a certain moment which allows the work to exist.

Although there is always an a priori idea that is a goal to be achieved, rules are modified by the system. So, reinterpretation is a big part of my job. 

As data is everywhere, it has a volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value. The way we choose it and how we tell things speaks about ourselves and where we belong. Numbers are not just numbers, as they can say more than they are supposed to be used. Data itself does not mean anything and that’s why I like to work between abstract and figurative.

The idea of losing control even for a moment plunges us into another logic. It challenges us about who is the creator and it makes the question bigger and bigger. But just as Michelangelo chose the best marble or Rembrandt looked for a nocturne paint that was most faithful to reality, I believe today we have data and interfaces to generate systems. Suddenly, when we believed that the act of thinking was exclusively human now it’s put into crisis.

Humans are precisely more human when we don’t confirm what we already know.