Design Informatics Seminar Series: Ricardo Vega Mora
Electric gestures: Writing & drawing using data and code
As an artist and designer, Ricardo Vega Mora’s practice unfolds within a transdisciplinary field spanning drawing, collage, comics, and programming code. Throughout this practice, he employs both analogue and digital media as materials for visual, textual, and sonic production.
His work explores the political, cultural, and aesthetic impact of digital technologies, utilised as machines for automated image generation, tools for subverting pixel order, devices for textual reorganisation, and media for data sonification, among other explorations.
Ricardo’s research uses data from diverse fields as raw material for artistic exploration and critical recontextualisation. His projects range from addressing the symbolic weight of national emblems (flags and anthems) and the subversion of social codes (the Chilean Constitution) to translating textual abstraction into visual and sonic forms (DNA).
In this presentation, Ricardo will examine some of his projects and motivations regarding data appropriation, as well as the importance of aesthetic exploration in its representation. Through subjectivity and personal perspective, this approach seeks to question a data-mediated society and challenge standardised paradigms of data representation.
EVENT DETAILS
PRESENTER BIO
Ricardo is a designer, artist, programmer, and cultural manager. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School for Design, and has studied Information Visualization and Data Science. He teaches at the School of Design and has also taught at the School of Engineering, both at the Catholic University of Chile (UC). He directs the Diploma in Data Visualization at the UC Design School. He is interested in transdisciplinary connections, pursuing studies in Philosophy and Science. He develops projects at the intersection of visualization, graphics, programming, art, and design, exploring the aesthetic and subjective representation of data. He is the founder of C80.cl, a project that, since 2015, has used visualizations to support a contextualized understanding of the 1980 Chilean Constitution. As an artist, he has participated in exhibitions, conferences, and presentations in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Estonia, and other countries.
