Welcome.
I'm Cristóbal, a programmer and researcher interested in documenting and expanding ways we build structures to dwell in. I'm from the Americas, broadly, but based in São Paulo.
I build and maintain software for video archives at Reduct and am part of the art collective AVENTURA. I write about art and culture both here on my blog and with TIS, which has lead to a master's thesis I'm pursuing at FAU-USP.
The jargony pitch: I explore gambiarra, Brazilian slang for the improvisational use of available materials, as a means to recuperate a constructive avant-garde within the context of the failure of modernism and peripheralization. I articulate gambiarra as the contestation of abstractions towards technical autonomy and as a means of transmission of contingency. The hope is to gesture towards a nomadic situatedness built on the techniques of "permapoetics."
I'm looking to collaborate on projects relating to:
○ Technical autonomy and self-construction; ○ Archives, compression, and transmission; ○ New techniques in digital representation; ○ Portable situatedness, lightweight structures; ○ Psychogeography and leisure in the city; ○ São Paulo as imagined and constructed space.
Before then, I studied computer science, among other liberal arts, at Stanford University.
Here, I share letters and notes (RSS):
Some indices I maintain:
~ A personal library of books
~ Github with software studies
~ My Are.na channels with references
~ Some photography on Instagram
~ An Entitled Opinions archive
Some friends you should visit:
↗ Chris Beiser on institutions and culture
↗ Chapman Caddell on literature and translation
↗ Rob Ochshorn on interfaces and politics
↗ Luca Parise on self-construction and the plastic arts
↗ Suspended Reason on frames and ecologies
↗ Omar Rizwan on new computer interfaces
This website is hosted on Arquipelago, a small experiment in sysadmin for media-intensive websites.