My creative-research examines the relations and interactions between the corporeal and the corpo-temporal in space. The capture and presentation of an alternative spatial consciousness, moving away from the understanding of linear temporality and a single limited physical space, are what drive my practice-based research. In regards to time, the eternal circular motion is emphasized. The communication between cultures, places, spaces and times result in the emergence of Translational SpacesThrough the use of media, materials, and the architectural space itself, I intent to make an infinite movable circuit installation based on the experiential alteration of space.


Through the intervention and transformation of space and materials, the installations become perceptual fields where multi-temporal and multi-spatial realities are explored. The light of the projected images immerse a space and the viewers to transport them to an alternate space. Spatial and digital drawings become blueprints, maquettes and maps of these Translational Spaces. My goal is to provide an alternative perspective and spatial consciousness that will transpose viewers to a place in-between the real and the fictional.






My studio-based research focuses on the alteration, manipulation and materialization of the digital through the construction and animation of reflective materials, technology and architectural spaces. My work examines viewers’ sensory stimulation within the virtual realm and the physical one, exploring the effects digital technology has on social interactions, communicational skills, inhabitation of spaces and notions of time.


Technology and media assist our perception and understanding of the world. This enhanced perspective enables the creation of our own spaces with no limitations between fact and fiction. This digital identity allows for the perception of spaces and times as containing physical and virtual realms that only exist symbiotically to one another. More than a functional tool, technology becomes a device that stimulates the imagination and stages the envisioning of infinite or multiple possibilities. Spaces and bodies have been experienced digitally as a “second life,” an illusion of space through stereographic images, and as a network of multiple distant and digital spaces that have become our virtual realities. With the increased access to spaces through mediated technology, what effects does this have on inhabiting, understanding, and perceiving architecture, space, art and culture?


My current practice is based on the construction of digitally architectural environments, with a focus on blurring the lines between the digital and the physical. Thinking about form and structure, my work inhabits physical and digital realms with moving images that repeat infinitely, as well as reflective structures/screens that alter the digital in an architectural space.  Starting from the studies of spatial and temporal phenomena, digital images become animated GIFs and 3D stereographic animations. I explore with the alteration of the digital through the manipulation of various reflective materials, such as mirrors and plexiglass, while experimenting with multiple screens, software, technology and ways of experiencing the work. These multi-media installations are physical, animated and spatial collages that repeat infinitely. My installations create a floating experience of space, where viewers are able to lose themselves in the dimensionless and soundless suspension of time. When experiencing the work viewers remain in the cyclical space of the infinite and intangible present. Viewers constantly have to reformulate, project and recalculate the self in the present, where fragments of time are not lost but rather carefully selected. Lines, lights, and colours transpose viewers, as they witness the constant translation between the digital and the physical within a space.


My research arises from the process of re-culturalization as a result of this experience of migration. A doubling of cultural identities deny the materiality of the world and the physicality of the body, since one always finds oneself in the here and there and also for the here and there to be within oneself. The use of technology as a tool of experimentation within a stage of infinitudes allow for the disembodiment or dislocation of the self, through the mediated vision and making of other possibilities. Technology’s effect does not provide answers or solutions but rather ambiguities between what is taken as truth and what is taken as fiction.








© Copyright 2020 Santiago Tavera