Patricio González Vivo (b. 1982, Buenos Aires) builds instruments of attention and wonder: a portrait series of secular saints, begun by drawing machines and completed by hand; a digital portal to the night sky his ancestors and he share across centuries; a sandbox of volcanic ash to amplify the ripple effect of reshaping its surface; a tarot deck that maps the grammar of light onto a system of archetypes. The forms are very different. The question underneath them is the same: what does it take for an artifact to develop presence?
Originally trained in clinical psychology and expressive arts therapy, González Vivo's early installations in Buenos Aires explored how collective gesture creates shared meaning. Efecto Mariposa (2011), built on volcanic ash from the Puyehue eruption, made ecological consequence palpable at the scale of a visitor's hand: participants reshaping a simulated landscape and watching life slowly return to what they had disturbed. That work became his first international exhibition, at FILE Festival São Paulo.
In 2012, he moved to New York to pursue an MFA at Parsons School of Design. His thesis, Skylines (2014), introduced the drawing machines that anchor his current practice: custom plotters that translate perception into material trace. His parallel commitment to open pedagogy produced the Book of Shaders (2015), now a foundational resource for digital artists worldwide, and the PixelSpirit Deck (2017), a tarot deck for learning the shader programming language that governs how light appears on every modern screen, now held by more than three thousand collectors worldwide.
Since 2017, González Vivo has pursued an ongoing study of astronomical computation, building Hypatia, an open-source library that calculates the real-time position of stars, planets, and satellites. This research gave rise to a decade-long series of works: LUNA, ESTRELLAS, HOGAR, Orbitas, Weaver, and Astros. Each renders the cosmos as it exists, now, for the room or body where the work appears. Several of these trace his own family history: Irish and Italian ancestors who arrived in Argentina under stars they had no names for, mapped through a south-up portrait of migration and belonging.
In recent years, his practice has converged on the plotter-and-oil painting series Hybrids and Santos, in which computer vision draws a structural scaffold on canvas that González Vivo then completes by hand. Neither system alone achieves what both develop together: the plotter carries the photograph's accuracy into the canvas; the brush carries what measurement cannot: attention, risk, the presence of a body in time.
His work has been exhibited internationally at Espacio Fundacion Telefonica, FILE São Paulo, SCOPE Arts New York, EYEO, Resonate, BrightMoments, and FlyingTokyo, and presented at the MIT Media Lab and Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught at Parsons School of Design, ITP NYU, and the School for Poetic Computation. His open-source libraries, including Hypatia, LYGIA, Vera, and Berthe, are in active use across the digital arts community.
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
