above/beneath all & all above/beneath
Artwork by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez @msoriaro 2025, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This project is part of the digital section of Cure³ at Bonhams, curated by Alex Estorick and Foteini Valeonti of reGEN

I have sought to convey intangible aspects of the human condition. The feeling of being part of a collective, being supported by others, finding help and helping when we can. Illness deprives many of a feeling of human dignity, or rather it makes it look like so from the outside. We are equally human no matter our condition, and this work simply wants to talk about that. With "above/beneath all & all above/beneath" I have chosen to imbue the system with very few elements & very few restraints, and let the system explore the human condition with this simple set of rules. The emergence of images that tickle some emotional component in the viewer is, then, as interesting as life itself. Using visual metaphors for very simple human bodies, the random combination of the very few degrees of freedom mimics the range of situations we face in life: from degeneration to regeneration, from a group of people together in grief to a group of people in celebration. From a technical point of view the artwork uses a technique that mimics how light creates what we see, where I deliberately break how it works to create a jagged space, with non-smooth surfaces, with the light travelling in non-uniform ways through areas of low visual/spatial resolution. All this to conjure some of the symptoms that come with Parkinson's, but at the same it's what brings more warmth and feeling to an otherwise cold, synthetic image. Such is the human nature, warm despite whichever harsh conditions, even emboldened under difficulty. Much like patients who, with all the burden of the condition they may have, manage to carry on with their lives and touch with their inner light the lifes of those around.

Made mostly with raymarching in glsl. Some p5 to ease the management of framebuffers, and to draw a couple of textures.

controls:
press s to save current image
press 1,2,3 to see the different images that make up the final image, or 0 to return to the final image
press p to pause/unpause the drawing process
press c (contrast), b (brightness) or g (gamma) then keep pressed + or - to alter their values
press l to completely halt/resume the script
URL parameters: append &pd=N to the URL, with N any number, to set that as the pixel density (higher N to obtain higher resolution images)

The artwork requires a modern, powerful GPU to be run in live mode. Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Opera, others) preferred. Firefox will render this very slowly. Safari seems to have some trouble with it (or my code with Safari!)

Last, if you try to find a _cure_, you may find it or not but trying is always a step in the right direction. Life finds new colours, then.