Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez is an innovative artist specializing in generative art, a field he has been involved in for over 25 years. After dabbling in the realm of generative art from his teenage years, Soria-Rodríguez has dedicated himself to this genre full-time over the last year.
His journey in this field ranges from early coding experiments to explorations of generative music and parametric design in architecture. The magic of establishing a set of rules and observing the emergent phenomena has always fascinated him. This process of generative art, for Soria-Rodríguez, is a combination of directed, rational play and a random exploration of rules and parameters.
Soria-Rodríguez finds inspiration in several modernist movements of the early twentieth century, notably Orphism and Suprematism. The geometrical nature and color exploration of these works lend themselves to generative art's expansion via broad parameter ranges. He sees echoes of artists like Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Hilma Af Klint, František Kupka, and Francis Picabia in his work. His first experiments with a pen plotter were attempts at Suprematist compositions.
The computer tools of the late 1980s and early '90s, such as the Macromedia Flash community and the demo scene of that period, have significantly influenced his current practice. Glitch and pixel aesthetics, prevalent in digital art today, resonate with him and take him back to his early explorations. He has been using "Processing," a programming language developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, for casual sketching since 2004 and it remains his primary artistic tool.
Music also has a substantial influence on his work, with instrumental music shaping his abstract pieces. Minimalists such as John Cage and Steve Reich, who were exploring generative concepts at the same time as computer art was emerging, inspire him. He also cites Philip Glass as a significant influence on both his visual and musical production. Soria-Rodríguez draws parallels between the works of JS Bach and geometrical generative practice, viewing both as explorations of rule-following and combination parameters.
His first long-form generative work, "Contrapuntos," was inspired by musical counterpoint and released on fxhash in November 2021. In this piece, he sought to recreate life's rhythms and activities in a geometrical form using rectangles of varying sizes, colors, and repetition frequencies.
Soria-Rodríguez has a keen interest in the intersection of generative art, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, derived from his corporate years devoted to innovation and strategy. He explores the differences between human cognition and artificial intelligence and ponders the question of cognition and what it means to be human. While he hasn't delved deeply into art produced with GANs (generative adversarial networks) in his practice, it's an area that intrigues him.
In his project "Entretiempos," he uses concentric rings that intersect, generating shapes through exploration of radius size, ring clusters, paint types, background colors, and paint precision. This results in a rich space of possibility, simultaneously provoking and leaving the viewer unmoved.
His works are published on Art Blocks, fxhash, and his website. Furthermore, Soria-Rodríguez is an active participant in the NFT community, working with platforms like Verse, where he mentors other artists and shares his work and processes.
