Little Martians
Here is the Little Martians official website!
When the pandemic hit I was already in Mars. Not so far as the planet Mars, but in a little part of the Sonoran desert where me and some friends created an art community/ R&D lab we call Mars. After all, if our technology could one day take some humans to Mars, we could just as well use it to try to inhabit the harsh parts of nowadays Earth. A high tech, low cost approach. It’s an exercise in resilience and sustainability, with a lot of space for artistic madness and fun. We hope to share whatever knowledge we gather with our projects' documentation and open source software libraries. It’s a seasonal enterprise, the Martian community is only functional during Winter time, but it’s a long term one.
I started collecting local clay and creating ceramics with primitive kilns I dug into the ground. Then I got fancy and started to experiment with a variety of art clays and glazes. I transformed the sculptures into 3d digital objects using a technique known as photogrammetry. With artificial intelligence tools, I created animations based on the sculptures. When I realized, I was creating a sci-fi tale about humans who mutate to adapt to a changing environment. Also, humans who don’t see a difference anymore between the physical world and its virtual simulation. So humans become Martians, a colorful, genderless, only head and no body, version of ourselves. It’s a playful extrapolation of some of the futuristic stereotypes of our present society. 2021 version of the ‘little green man’ alien classic.
Not so different from us, these future humans like to spend their time telling stories, imagining the past and the future. I plan to spend many years imagining their stories and inviting people to join me in such task.
My artworks used to be about historical research, tales of world history. During the pandemic I started to put my energy into imagining futures I’d like to live in, how not to fall into dystopia. A little bit of joy, playfulness and hope.
