Héctor LópezGonzález
Digital and light artist, graphic designer and creative coder. Mexico City, 1998.
Biography
I have worked with light for more than fifteen years, and in 2015 I co-founded Estudio Difuso, where I always ended up in charge of the technology, even though that was never my role. One day someone told me I should make it clear on social media: I’m not the IT guy. “No soy el de sistemas” has been my pseudonym ever since.
My work starts from personal and social concerns and turns them into pieces of light, sound and structure that people walk through or interact with, with or without a screen in between. I am completing the Master’s in Digital Art and New Media at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and I have taught for more than thirteen years.
Statement
My work begins with a concern, usually personal or close to home: something that is wrong, socially or physically, and that I cannot yet name. I work around the human being as data: the physical and psychological conditions of my own body, the social data a group leaves behind, such as the LGBTIQ+ community, to which I belong, and the memory that this keeps or loses. I am drawn to what is unjust, forgotten or unequal.
Light has been part of my practice for more than fifteen years because it can transform a space, a mood or a moment, for better or worse. Metal gives me a rigid structure and a challenge: how to use it so that it adds something. I cut, weld and assemble my pieces myself; materiality and handwork are essential to me. Data is inseparable from being human: without it we neither know nor measure. Code is what binds all of this together; it lets me interpret, control, show and create.
I move between two extremes: contemplative pieces where you simply watch the light change, and pieces where whoever arrives becomes part of what happens. I do not expect everyone to feel the same thing. If someone asks what they are looking at, why it is there and what it is for, the work has done its job.
Process
- ConcernSomething that unsettles me or that I don’t understand; the questions start there.
- ResearchReading, asking, looking at what others have said, testing it on my own body.
- WritingOrdering ideas and deciding whether the piece is digital, physical or both.
- IterationPrototypes along different paths, with AI running through the whole workflow.
- ProductionDimensions, materials and technology. If it works, it is done; if not, back to iterating.
Tools: addressable and CCT LED strips, ESP32, sensors, TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine, Ableton Live, steel tube and aluminum.