Curator Sergi Rusca (fragment from his text for A Heavy Halo)
“In B L I S T E R, Oscar Santillán highlights the earthbound quality of A.I. systems. On a laptop screen, we see a video generated by a combination of neural networks and 3D software. The video is displayed in the very same laptop in which this digital aspect of the piece was originally made, and it is physically held by a metal structure filled with found wooden logs. The logs are evocative of our surrounding ecologies, and given their common burning for fuel, they too evoke what was perhaps the most important technology for our ancestors: fire. On the other side of the sculpture, two highly-detailed 3D prints reveal a trans-species presence composed of minerals, bones, biological and robotic elements, and undefined forms. By layering physical and synthetic realities together, B L I S T E R is an emphatic prompt to the obstinate Earthly relationship between the divergent systems that compose our planet.”
