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.

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.

I'm currently working on a master's thesis at FAU-USP. I explore gambiarra, or improvised self-construction, as a means of transmitting information while defamiliarizing techniques towards new ends. I take the archive as a metaphor and tease out some tensions, for those of us who want to build for others, between compression & exuberance, explicitness & transparency, and lightness & dependency.

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.

Reach me via email, or on twitter, bluesky, and mastodon.

:wq