Express, flex, reflex

1. Dental plaster, metal, rubber bands, LED lighting.
2. Shower Curtain

Continuation of work for Flat Affect 

Plano afectivo | Flat Affect

Andrea Carrillo Iglesias (1986, Tijuana, Mexico) presents Flat Affect (Plano afectivo) an exhibition that explores the ethics and aesthetics of empathy through the design and production of smiles. Based on concepts and dental design techniques from smile design, the work carries a speculative methodology, a sort of future archeology that delves into the ruins of the present. The narrative is set against a landscape in which emotion and empathy become a technological extension, and where the body is a quantifiable enterprise molded by hyperreality.

Carrillo’s work mainly crosses two parallel lines of thought: the leading role of digital images in the medical industry —not only as representations, but as tools that operate onto reality—, as well as the capitalist dynamics that transform, among other things, body and healthcare into commodified goods.

Jens Eder and Charlotte Klank give us an account of the way images operate upon the world in Image Operations. Visual Media and Political Conflict (2017, Manchester University Press), and the three ways in which they actively infer from the world: As part of a machine operation, as a motivation for a social group to take action, and as a means of manipulation of affects and thoughts.

Regarding the research that lies at the center of Flat Affect, these operative images are found on multiple levels of the medical industry, specifically in the dental health services, aiding to construct the perception of the body and its health, while also participating in the construction of desire. Through her work, Carrillo triggers the agency of the medical / aesthetic industry by setting it against a technological reality such as Faception. A company that claims to predict, reveal and catalog someone’s personality solely through an image. Corrective prostheses modify, quantify and optimize the smile when responding to these technologies creating a language that incorporates both an ancestral form of knowledge and a current one. This future archeology collapses time to weave a past that seems distant — the Totonaca pre hispanic culture with its smiley faces— with the future of facial recognition and the possible emotional and physiological changes this technology could encite.

The digital image with all its complex processes becomes indispensable in this flow of information, desire and capital, but its always in response to a symptomatic condition propelled by late capitalism. We create images to modify the body, and we modify the body to create images. The acceleration and feedback between flesh, pixel and currency becomes indistinguishable.

Island of Simulation

Island of Simulation, A Tropical Playground is comprised of a performative sound/video installation that explores the technological, ethical and aesthetic implications embedded in the simulation of tropical ecosystems. The narrative is set against the Climatron, a geodesic dome greenhouse built in the 1960s in St. Louis, Missouri that attempted to simulate the climate zones of Hawaii, Java, the Indies, and the Amazon for research and spectacle purposes. 

The work draws upon the complex issues around the production of the landscape, revealing colonial logics and principals of exoticism, the relationship between power and spectacle, and how western knowledge has been legitimized through science, technology and aesthetics means. Fluctuating between fact and fiction, the work attempts to subvert the ways in which we come to understand this tropical landscape and speculate on new forms of approaching nature. Through the use of animism multiple non-human sensibilities are brought forward, sharply manifesting a super natural dimension linked to the body and the sensorial. The characters of the story; the dome, the plants, and the fake rocks, are able to weave narratives around the ethnocentric obsessions of reproducing mini foreign worlds in enclosed spaces, posing larger questions around our complex relationship to nature as an “Other”. Through desire these characters attempt to seduce the audience as a way to bring the tension between the desire of the object and the absurdity behind it.

Proyector: Sobre la línea

Diseño de exhibición y publicación para la exhibición inaugural de Proyector: “Sobre la línea: La frontera vertical distribuida / Walk the Line: The Distributed Vertical Border”. Una lectura espacial y territorial que examina las arquitecturas que han surgido como respuesta al movimiento migratorio desde Centroamérica a lo largo del territorio Mexicano hacia la frontera norte con EUA.

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Proyector es una plataforma curatorial con base en la Ciudad de México, dedicada a promover voces emergentes en investigación contemporánea en arquitectura. Proyector está comprometido con el fomento de nuevas estrategias y herramientas críticas, teóricas e históricas sobre asuntos espaciales.

proyectormx.org

Something Will Happen and My iCloud is Full

Six-channel video and sound installation
6 min

This piece explores the use of webcams as a cinematic medium, operating both as a means of control as well as a filmic device that can create a space of connection, intimacy and bodily experience. Through various webcams usage that explore a sensorial experience, focusing on tactility and sound like ASMR technics, I explore the reinstitution of the body and the reclamation of the medium as a form of filmmaking. Webcam screens, both capturing and projecting are addressed as a an imaginative space of subject formation, and a medium with a sense of interiority and mental space. Thus, creating a performative setting that constantly questions and participates in the formation of the self.

Parkour by Heart

"Parkour by Heart: Setting a Performative Frame" Exhibition Catalogue. 

Stranger In-between

A 20 minute audio piece that explores physical space and its identity through sound. It reflects my journey in a multifaceted space that is characterized for housing the death, wild life, machinery and tourists, among other things. I perceived the sonic language of Mount Auburn cemetery in constant flux of rhythms and languages, debating between the rural and the industrial, between animal and machine, day and night. Interested in the hybrid quality these dichotomies could produce when merged, I aimed to explore the intersectionality, the mid point, or space of fusion between these dualities, hoping to reveal a third space in where the listener can explore a sense of otherness. 

To listen to the sound piece soundcloud.com/stranger-in-between

Rise to the Sky

Throughout time, ‘Space’ and ‘Sky’ has symbolized an unknown territory, a utopian surface to which we speculate and dream. ‘Rise to the Sky’ is an audio piece, a collage of documents reflecting upon the connection between the CAVS to Sky and Space practices, and subsequently its relationship to NASA. The Project developed as part of the editorial board of Experimental Publishing at ACT and the exhibition "Don’t Erase till Monday"

Stemming from a series of encounters with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection, an archive under the custodianship of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture & Technology (ACT), the editorial board of Experimental Publishing at ACT presents an indefinitely temporary musing into the utopic matrimony of art and science.

Don’t Erase Till Monday showcases five publications that negotiate with CAVS as an archive of Fellows’ aspirations and correspondences, always flirting with fiction or a not-yet reality. The publications make public pieces of the CAVS universe without necessarily adhering to its optimistic agenda for harmonizing art and science at the civic scale. Using forms of print, performance, video, and public intervention, Don’t Erase Till Monday occupies the space between eulogy and rejuvenation through meditations on landscapes, the sky, 1969, speculative ruins, dictatorship, frontiers, audience-making, and participation.

To listen to the audio soundcloud.com/rise-to-the-sky
Check our tumblr to learn more donterasetillmonday.tumblr.com

I Have Nothing to Say

Full title: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it, just as John Cage had nothing to say and he said it and that is poetry as I need it". This project consists of a performative text written for a wokshop with artist Jill Magid. 

- 1 - 
The absurd of not having anything to say and having to extensively justified myself by saying it. 

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I have nothing to say, I need silence.

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I have nothing to say, I need silence so I can hear others think.

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I have nothing to say, this is the rationale to keep looking for something to say.

- 5 -
I have nothing to say and that is saying something.

- 6 -
I have nothing to say, I need silence to hear myself.

- 7 -
I have nothing to say… the impossibility of language; I can’t communicate what I want to say.

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I have nothing to say and I feel powerful.

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I have nothing to say, I don’t want to talk about myself. 

- 10 -
I have nothing to say, I want silence as a form of intimacy.
Isn’t odd that is more difficult to share silences than words? 

- 11-
 I have nothing to say, I want to share my silence.

- 12 - 
I have nothing to say, art as communication became for myself a miserable failure.

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I have nothing to say, I need silence to be myself, to be with myself. 

- 14 - 
I have nothing to say, but if I had to say something I would say that there should be room for silence in language. 

- 15 - 
I have nothing to say and I shouldn’t feel uncomfortable, why are we intimidated by silence?

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I have nothing to say, I want to hear the environment.

- 17 -
I have nothing to say, I want to free my mind from my likes and dislikes, from arguments, binary comparisons, from ideology. I want to hear.

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I have nothing to say, I want to read.

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I have nothing to say, I want to know the consequences of my silences.

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I have nothing to say, its 2:45 am, Lamont Library, I really don’t have anything to say.

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I have nothing to say, “Why must one always talk?
Often one shouldn’t talk, but live in silence. The more talk, the less the words mean.” 

- 22 -
I have nothing to say, why do I need to explain myself? 

- 23 -
I have nothing to say, yet if I frame it right it might become a profound piece of speech. 

- 24 -
I have nothing to say, words are complicated I feel fixed by them. 

- 25 -
I have nothing to say, I don’t want you to misinterpret me. 

- 26 -
I have nothing to say, but I want to share. 

- 27 -
I have nothing to say, I am tired. 

- 28 -
I have nothing to say, like Robert Bresson I want to communicate through immobility and silence. 

- 29 -
I have nothing to say, how long is a minute of silence? 

- 30 -
I have nothing to say, my silence is more eloquent than my speech. 

- 31 -
I have nothing to say, silence will reveal my most secret self.

- 32 - 
I have nothing to say, I choose to be silent. 

- 33 -
I have nothing to say, your reading allowes me to hear myself.

Anosmia

Four minute video created during a short residency in Marfa,Texas, exploring the relationship between Fire Ants behavior and the car and petroleum industry, both known to the State of Texas. 

El Diablo Fue Alguna Vez Ángel

(The Devil was once an Angel) Collection of flags that deal with the cultural representation, symbolism, and politics of power associated with drug trafficking and organize crime in Mexico. The aesthetic stems from the language and icons use in “narco-corrido” and other openly cultural expressions, reflecting the aspirational nature of power and its dynamics in narco culture. The project demonstrates the collusion between different government entities, organized crime, and civil society... 

Mexican Connection I & II

Poster and publication for The Mexican Connection at The Balie, Amsterdam, NL.

Sandberg Exhibition Catalogue

Publication
size: 222 x 278 mm

"Somewhere Between Cat and Ruin" 2015 Sandberg Instituut Design Graduation Catalogue. Through the technical use of metaball renders, we created a three dimensional terrain that positions the graduates and their projects in an ideological space, traversing through different parameters. Rather than trying to define the graduates design practice, we acknowledge the co-existence of multiple positions and attitudes, as well as its temporality, reinforcing the iterative nature of the department and the liquid state of their identities. Publication design was made in collaboration with Arthur Röing Baer and Ekaterina Kholyapina. Curated by Agata Jaworska.

Borderlands

Website

Research project that focuses on the use of space and its relationship with the Tijuana-San Diego border experience. It emphasizes the importance of knowing how different social groups that inhabit the border region experience space and how, from these different experiences, space is redefined. The website houses a series of records (mental map, photo diary and mapping of daily routes with a GPS tracking device) from six persons with contrasting profiles. (Work in progress)
borderlands.acarrillo.info

Insurgente Seasonal Beers + more

Label design and illustration work for Cervecería Insurgente seasonal beer realeases. Other printed materials include posters, six packs and glassware design. 

Insurgente

Identity, Branding

Identity design for the Mexican microbrewery Insurgente. The identity alludes to the historical context of insurgence in Mexico by reclaiming elements that evoke a sense of revolution and action. The concept of an insurgent was rethought to fit a more contemporary environment through its visual and verbal language. The work includes collateral material, label and packaging design, and environmental graphics. Illustrations created in collaboration with Israel Gutierrez.

Ghost Loft

Projection, video

Visual language design for Ghost Loft’s public performances (projections). Shapes and images react to sound, project developed in collaboration with Adam Guzman. 

WDCH

Walt Disney Concert Hall blog design

Back 2 Basix

Exhibition

Selected projects in various mediums for the collective artists and designers exhibition "Back 2 Basix" which took place at the Art N Crafts loft in Highland Park, California.

Art Center Publications

Poster / Brochure
size: 609 x 914 mm

Poster design for undergraduate Interactive program at Art Center College of design.

Dot Magazine

Publication
size: 222 x 278 mm

Featured article and annual report design for Art Center’s Dot Magazine. Spring 2012 and summer 2013 issues.

ACCD Catalogue

Book
size: 166 x 235 mm

2013-2014 catalog design for the undergraduate and graduate programs at Art Center College of Design. Developed in collaboration with Simon Johnston, Winnie Li and Eliana Dominguez. 

Cascais Sistema de Som

Identity, Print
Mentor: Clive Piercy

Identity design for Cascais Sistema de Som, a month-long music festival in Cascais, Portugal that brings together artists from all over the world creating a mixture of sounds, ranging from the ethnic to the synthetic. Contrasting sounds coalesce to form a singular sound system. The identity was created as a reflection of this, acting as a flexible system in which colors and textures identify different musical genres and their combinations.

Tía Emma

Book

Size: 179 x 241mm
Mentor: Paul Hauge

This is a two-volume book designed as a tribute to my dear aunt Emma, a pioneer in publicity and public relations for the fashion industry in Mexico. These books chronicle her life from two perspectives: the passion for her work, and the love for her family. Many of the documents and photographs were found in boxes, which allowed us to revive her memory. In this way, the books portray the intimacy of looking through an old photo album or box of relics. An attempt was made to recover elements that were important at the time, which may seem obsolete today.This can be seen in the use of a typewriter, an instrument that radically marked her life as a publicist and served as her primary working tool.  

Lola Sans

Typography
Mentor: Leah Toby Hoffmitz

Lola Sans typeface is a regular sans serif with a condensed approach. It was developed under the guidance of Leah Hoffmitz at Art Center College of Design during the spring and summer of 2010. Its inception was sparked from gothic proportions of Trade Gothic as well as the soft, yet, squared nature of DIN. This typeface can be characterized by its somewhat condensed appearance as well as its mild contrast between thick and thin strokes.

OTHER!

My process, explorations, never finished work, mental maps, other vesions... all is consider. (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)