Va2rosa
A collaborative universe in progress
When 2020 pandemic hit I was already in Mars. Not so far as the planet Mars, but in a little part of the Sonoran desert where me and some friends created an art community/ R&D lab we call Mars. After all, if our technology could one day take some humans to Mars, we could just as well use it to try to inhabit the harsh parts of nowadays Earth. A high tech, low cost approach. It’s an exercise in resilience and sustainability, with a lot of space for artistic madness and fun. We hope to share whatever knowledge we gather with our projects' documentation and open source software libraries. It’s a seasonal enterprise, the Martian community is only functional during North Hemisphere Winter time, but it’s a long term one.
I started collecting local clay and creating ceramics with primitive kilns I dug into the ground (in this post one can read more about this process!). Then I got fancy and experimented with a variety of art clays and glazes. I transformed the sculptures into 3d digital objects using a technique known as photogrammetry. With artificial intelligence tools and 3d softwares, I made animations based on the sculptures. When I realized, I was creating a sci-fi tale about humans who mutate to adapt to a changing environment. I thought they would be living beings who don’t see a difference anymore between the physical world and its virtual simulation. So humans become Martians, a colorful, genderless, only head and no body, version of ourselves. It’s a playful extrapolation of some of the futuristic stereotypes of our present society. 2020's version of the ‘little green man’ alien classic. Here is a blog post about this phase of the project :)
I was so happy with the opportunity to collaborate with Simon de la Rouviere and Gene Kogan in the creation of the short story "Little Martians and the Human Memorial Monument". In this case, I proposed Simon to write something integrated with the Logged Universe series, which focuses on what happens to humans after they upload their minds to a simulation. I wrote a story partially based on a children's book about world art history, that I created with Claire Parizel and published in Brazil with Viajante do Tempo Publishing House. Gene participated by developing custom AI animations for the story, using my illustrations and the dataset I created on my ceramic sculptures.
My world building is still under construction. I've been wondering, why should the Martians be mostly humanoids? What is the future of life in the Solar System? What if we're only one part of the story? I started to collaborate with other Mars College fellows in creating new stories about what happens to life in the Solar System. I believe this project can develop as collaborative storytelling, somewhat in the line of what Simon has been proposing with the Logged Universe, but also what Gene proposes with Abraham and AI collective intelligence content generation.
My artworks used to be about historical research, tales of world history. The pandemic crisis pushed me into imagining futures I’d like to live in, how not to fall into dystopia. A little bit of joy, playfulness and hope.
Hope you enjoy it,