Artist in Focus: Rodrigo Carvalho aka VISIOPHONE
Artist in Focus is an ongoing series featuring hic et nunc artists. Interested in being featured in the series? Please complete this form.
PT: Tell us a little about yourself, including what brought you to hic et nunc.
RC: My name is Rodrigo Carvalho (aka VISIOPHONE), and I’m a Designer and Interactive New Media artist from Porto, Portugal. My work on live visuals, coding and interactive art involves a range of different outputs, from screen digital work, interactive installations and audiovisual live acts to interactive visuals for stage performances. I have presented worldwide at events like Sonar Festival (Barcelona), Eyes Ears and Feet (Austin), Mutek (Barcelona), Echo (Dubai), Iminente (Lisboa) and BAM (Liege).
Around November 2020, I started to see some of the new media and interactive artists I have admired and followed for many years posting about CryptoArt and NFTs (e.g. Joanie Lemercier, Mario Klingemann and Frederik Vanhoutte). I was interested, so researched the different available platforms. I started minting some things on Rarible and also got an account on Known Origin. But I never felt any connections with those platforms. I found myself lost in a sea of 3D bald humanoids and rotating ETH crystals. Then, around January/February 2021, gas fees became extremely expensive and I started to become aware of the ecologic disaster of PoW blockchains.
It felt like a website from the 90s, like an NFT underground with barely any information or functionality. It was hic et nunc.
In early March, I saw Wblut’s iso cities emerging in a new, weird platform. It felt like a website from the 90s, like an NFT underground with barely any information or functionality. It was hic et nunc. I learned that this platform addressed many of the energy and financial barrier issues of previous ones and found that many of the artists I follow were starting to explore here, too. It felt like home for me.
PT: What’s the story behind the piece you selected to share?
RC: TUA RIVER A1 is part of a series of explorations looking for interesting, uneven terrains on TangramJS, a website where you can extract height-maps from the real world. Height-maps are used to explore abstract topographic lines through 3D visualizations and animations. The Tua River is located in the north of Portugal.
PT: Can you share an element of your creative practice?
RC: Height-maps are used as displacements maps to explore abstract topographic lines. This series started at the end of 2020 when I was working on a project related to the region where Port wine is made (an area along the Douro River in the north of Portugal called the “Douro Demarcated Region”). On that project, I made my first experiments with abstract topographic lines and height-maps from the Douro River. These images and gifs were my first mints on hic et nunc. I have continued to explore this process with a series on the Rio Grande Canyon in New Mexico and then with this series on the Rio Tua.
PT: What’s a recent work that you collected on hic et nunc that you’re excited about and why?
RC: Yellowtail by Golan Levin. Golan Levin has been one my favorite artists and references since I started to study and work on new media and interactive art (around 2008). It’s amazing that he is here on hic et nunc and that I can collect some of his pieces. This one is also special because it’s a historic piece of interactive art (it’s from 1998), and Golan translated it to p5js (I guess) so it works in a browser in hic et nunc.
PT: What is something you’d like to see for the future of hic et nunc and NFTs?
RC: I would like to have an easy way to display my collections on screens.
VISIOPHONE’s collections
More of VISIOPHONE’s work exploring abstract topographic lines can be found here.
