Patricio Gonzalez Vivo (b. 1982, Buenos Aires) is a multidisciplinary artist working across traditional and digital media. He explores awareness, perception, and self-discovery through motifs such as celestial artifacts, symbolic knowledge, and temporal cartographies. His work weaves together the poetic and the procedural, revealing hidden structures behind the ways we measure and make sense of the world.
Originally trained in clinical psychology and expressive arts therapy, Patricio's early works centered on participatory installations designed to foster the experience of collective co-creation. One of his first major work, Communitas (2010), invited visitors to collaboratively construct a shared image through mutual observation and gesture. His first international breakthrough, Efecto Mariposa (2011), was an ash-based installation that simulated an interactive ecosystem in which visitors experienced the cascading consequences of their actions. These projects examined the tensions between chaos and order, the individual, and the collective, the ephemeral, and the enduring.
In 2012, he relocated to the United States to pursue an MFA in Design & Technology at Parsons School of Design. During this period, his practice shifted toward the construction of algorithmic tools and custom creative systems like: drawing machines, live-coding environments, open-source libraries, some of which are still the buildings blocks of his practice. Since 2017, he has expanded this research through the creation of his own astronomical instruments, exploring the relationship between inner experience and the cosmos through scale, time, and presence.
In more recent years, and particularly in response to the proliferation of machine-generated imagery, Patricio has returned to traditional oil painting, not as a rejection of technology, but as a way of insisting on something machines cannot replicate: the slow accumulation of attention, the risk of failure, the presence of a body in time. For Patricio, human intelligence is fundamentally embodied, it emerges through sensation, intuition, and lived experience, and this conviction shapes every dimension of his practice.
A defining commitment of Patricio's work is open dissemination. He develops and releases open-source libraries and platforms that expand the possibilities of digital art, positioning software as both a medium for knowledge and for expression. His influential Book of Shaders (2015) become a foundational resource for digital artists working. Similarly his PixelSpirit tarot Deck (2017), which bridges the ancient divination system with shader programming, it's another education tool that bridges the poetic nature of code with symbolic knowledge. Patricio also shares openly his digital building blocks in the form of libraries such as Lygia, Vera, Berthe, and Hypatia, which are ongoing as instruments for creative exploration. For the artist, this open sharing is not ancillary to the work, it is itself a form of authorship and cultural contribution.
His work has been exhibited and presented internationally at platforms such as EYEO, Resonate, GROW, FILE, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, BrightMoments, FlyingTokyo, DotDotDot and FASE. He has delivered talks and lectures at institutions including the MIT Media Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry and Politecnico di Milano. He has taught at Parsons School of Design, ITP NYU, SFPC (School for Poetic Computation), and the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Arte in Argentina.
2025 Solar Biennale, at Museum of Contemporary Design, Switzerland
2025 NetGala, New York City
2024 Projecto Curatorial Museo Ernesto de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires
2023 Bright Moments
2020 BienalBit
2017 Historia de un malentendido at Espacio Pla, Buenos Aires
2017 Temporal Topologies show at IFP, New York City
2015 +CODE, Buenos Aires
2014 SCOPE Arts Show, New York City
2013 CLOUDS
2013 FILE Festival, Rio de Janeiro
2012 FASE, Buenos Aires
2012 FILE Festival, São Paulo
2012 TEDxTenaris, Buenos Aires
