BLINK
2023
Real-time Generative Art
Variable dimensions
Real-time satellite view of Earth
My second child was born in 2019. For those first months, the four of us nested together, time moving differently, slow and full, measured in feedings rather than hours. From inside that smallness, I kept returning to the largest possible version of the same feeling: the planet as home, the whole of it, seen from far enough away to be held in a single frame.
HEARTH/HOGAR is a real-time window onto Earth, drawn from images sent every ten minutes by the GOES geostationary satellite. Those satellite images have something removed from them: atmospheric scattering, filtered out to protect the sensors from direct solar exposure. The work adds it back: the blue haze, the warm luminescence at the Earth's edges, the quality that makes the planet look alive and breathable. What you see is not raw instrument data. It is Earth as it would appear from that orbit to a human eye: the clouds drifting slowly as the frames are interpolated into continuous motion, the terminator advancing, the atmosphere glowing at its rim.
The title holds two languages at once: hearth, the English word for the fire at the center of a home, warmth, the place you return to; and hogar, its Spanish equivalent, which carries the same meaning but also the specific weight of belonging, of the place that is unambiguously yours. The planet the satellite shows does not divide into hogar and not-hogar. It is all hearth, all home, all the way to the edge of the atmosphere.
That was the thought I kept returning to during those nesting months: that the small home I was tending was continuous with the one turning slowly in the image. The same ground, seen from different altitudes.
