Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

Artist

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez · iillucid.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/marcelo-soria-rodriguez ↗

Based

Born 1977, Almería, Spain. Lives and works in Madrid, Spain

Practice

Generative systems, digital and physical images, sound, writing, and experiments in human-machine perception

Now

variaciones del yo remains available through Art Blocks Studio, while entretiempos is on view in EMULATION through August 16, 2026

In the set

entretiempos ↗ · 1,000 editions
siempre en mí, siempre en ti ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez approaches generative art through a question larger than visual variation: what kinds of knowledge, feeling, and agency become possible when humans and machines make things together? Born in Almería in 1977 and based in Madrid, he studied Telecommunications Engineering and Signal Processing before working in innovation, strategy, and data.¹² That technical history matters, but it does not reduce his art to an illustration of computation. His systems are constructed as spaces of encounter, places where programmed constraints meet contingency, cultural memory, and the viewer’s own habits of recognition.

His account of becoming an artist moves between early encounters with twentieth-century abstraction, experiments with oscilloscopes and Matlab, photography, Processing, and a return to sustained creative coding during the 2020 lockdown.² The resulting practice is deliberately porous. Painting informs software; music supplies models of repetition and counterpoint; code produces images that can become prints or moving works; essays provide another medium for testing ideas. What joins these activities is an interest in the “total cognitive space” of a system, the full but never entirely graspable range of forms and interactions latent within a set of rules.³

Soria-Rodríguez does not ask code merely to multiply pictures. He uses it to make relationships visible: between moments, between people, and between human intention and machine behavior.

Between modernism and machine time

entretiempos began with the visual language of Sonia Delaunay: circles, intersecting geometries, juxtaposed colors, and the rhythmic construction of abstraction. Soria-Rodríguez has described the work as emerging from concentric rings and the shapes produced where they overlap.² Yet the project is not a digital imitation of a historical style. It takes modernist abstraction as a vocabulary that can be stretched across a computational parameter space. Rings vary in scale and grouping; surfaces can appear solid, lined, or outlined; palettes, backgrounds, precision, and spatial organization shift from output to output.⁴⁶

That translation changes the status of the image. A painted composition presents one resolved arrangement. A generative program holds many possible arrangements and makes each visible through execution. The official Art Blocks record identifies entretiempos as an Art Blocks Curated release comprising 1,000 unique artworks, released on 14 February 2022.⁵ Its scale is therefore both numerical and conceptual: 1,000 editions disclose only selected positions within a much larger field of potential outcomes.

The title, meaning “between times,” directs attention away from the final frame and toward the intervals of computation. Soria-Rodríguez has connected the project to multiple timescales, including the time required for a work to render and the intermediate stages generated along the way.²⁶ This concern makes animation and process structurally significant. Forms do not simply occupy space; they register different rates of arrival, transformation, and disappearance. Musical concepts enter the system as descriptions of temporal form and spatial tempo, reinforcing the sense that an output can be read like a score whose voices coexist without collapsing into unison.⁴⁶

The historical reference consequently becomes active rather than reverential. Orphism’s colored rhythms meet the procedural duration of software. The circle functions simultaneously as motif, rule, intersection, and event. Soria-Rodríguez has located his influences among Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Kandinsky, Kupka, Hilma af Klint, Suprematism, early computer art, minimalist music, and the visual cultures of Flash and the demo scene.⁴ These sources are not flattened into a single genealogy. They become materials placed under pressure by a medium capable of repetition without exact recurrence.

Live on Art Blocks: entretiempos-by-marcelo-soria-rodriguez ↗

Systems that remember

If entretiempos foregrounds historical and computational time, siempre en mí, siempre en ti turns generative structure toward memory, degeneration, and care. The work belongs to reGEN, an Art Blocks initiative supporting Cure Alzheimer’s Fund. Five artists each created 200 works, making 1,000 NFTs across the initiative, with proceeds directed to the fund.⁷ Soria-Rodríguez’s contribution consists of exactly 200 editions and was released through Art Blocks Presents on 27 October 2023; Art Blocks states that 100 percent of its primary proceeds went to the cause.⁸

The project’s title, “always in me, always in you,” proposes memory as relational rather than privately stored. Identity persists through another person’s gestures, recollections, and acts of attention, even when an individual’s access to memory changes. Within this frame, generative variation carries an ethical charge. Difference is not an error to be corrected, and instability is not merely an aesthetic effect. Both become conditions through which a system can model continuity without demanding sameness.

Formally, the animated work projects faces that fade, wave, and remain unstable. Some smile and some appear sad; colored geometries carry dreams, memories, fears, and recurring thoughts, while facial construction lines move with them. Multiple faces can appear, and viewers can pause the motion or type `youinme` to reveal the project’s relational view.⁸ These are not decorative effects applied to the theme. They make persistence and disappearance part of the work’s behavior.

Soria-Rodríguez has spoken openly about family experiences of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, placing this work within a longer sequence that includes all that remains and the 2025 project above/beneath all & all above/beneath.⁹ That sequence expands the stakes of his earlier inquiries into machine cognition. The question is no longer only whether a synthetic system might exhibit something recognizable as taste or emotion. It is also whether computational art can help audiences approach vulnerability, dependence, and the forms of knowledge carried by bodies and relationships.

This shift does not abandon abstraction. It gives abstraction a different task. Faces cohere and dissolve through change, persistence, fragmentation, and mutual implication. Successive transformations let one state remain legible inside another. The resulting image is less a diagram of neurological degeneration than a meditation on what remains transmissible between people.

Live on Art Blocks: siempre-en-mi-siempre-en-ti-by-marcelo-soria-rodriguez ↗

From parameter space to social space

Soria-Rodríguez’s work repeatedly tests the boundary between a system’s formal space and its social consequences. His earlier career included building data practices for large financial institutions, an experience that gave him direct knowledge of how code organizes decisions beyond the screen.⁹ In his art, this awareness appears as skepticism toward the fiction that technical systems are neutral. Parameters encode priorities. Interfaces distribute agency. Even a visual algorithm carries assumptions about what should vary, what should remain fixed, and what becomes visible.

His collaborations and exhibitions extend this relational logic. PAL, made with Iskra Velitchkova, was presented as a four-day generative performance during ART SG in January 2023.¹⁰ A 2024 event at Espacio Fundación Telefónica placed him in a public conversation about work moving between physical and virtual conditions.¹¹ The Museum of the Moving Image later presented his practice to audiences through a community-curation selection for its Schlosser Media Wall, describing an approach led by exploration, experimentation, and curiosity.¹² Each context emphasizes that generative art is not confined to the minted output. It moves among code, display architecture, performance, conversation, collecting, and institutional interpretation.

Two current Art Blocks contexts extend that breadth. His 2024 Studio project variaciones del yo remains available, with Art Blocks listing 71 of its 125 works as remaining on July 11, 2026.⁹¹³ At the same time, entretiempos is on view in EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500 at the Museum of Art + Light. Art Blocks identifies the artist and project, while the museum lists the exhibition through August 16, 2026.¹⁴¹⁵ That curatorial premise is especially apt. Soria-Rodríguez’s work does not treat computation as a rupture with the past. It treats code as one more cultural technique through which inherited languages can be replayed, questioned, and made newly responsive.

His most compelling systems therefore remain unresolved in a productive sense. They are precise constructions designed to produce circumstances the artist cannot fully predict. They join technical authorship to an acceptance of contingency, then connect that contingency to questions of emotion and responsibility. Across entretiempos and siempre en mí, siempre en ti, variation becomes more than abundance. It becomes a method for thinking about how forms endure through change, how one state carries another within it, and how human meaning can arise in the interval between rule and result.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez links page ↗.