Past Work
X,X,X is a minimalist furniture object designed to be rotated, disassembled, shifted, and recomposed within a space by considering interaction and environment as a way to explore human relations. It creates a new social context for itself and others through its modularity, morphing into different spatial settings based on activities or mood. X,X,X is an artwork and installation commissioned by Bas Fisher Invitational intended to be reconfigured based on the gallery's needs, the parts will facilitate future programming, and the programming will activate the parts. X,X,X is accompanied by a video performance piece Across Along Axis which serves as an instructional component to the work. The performance shows the use of the furniture object through a choreography of assembly and disassembly of the pieces. The piece was choreographed by Deon Rubi, Leoni Garcia, and Megan Caravajal and also performed live in situ.
Sculpture
Stills from short film Emergency Action Plan where I worked as the Production Designer for the black box theatre flashback inserts.
The concept was to recreate the main character's childhood memories. To achieve this I relied on suggestive architectural elements to imply place, such as "window" or "column", to highlight only the most important details, because memories tend to be hazy and not complete, there are purposefully parts missing. Dir. Dylan Redford
Film
13 is a collection of furniture designed around the cylinder. The pieces are an exercise and exploration of the possibilities of a shape to create volumes, planes, and mass.
The tube has become synonymous with Deon Rubi furniture design.
Design
A.R
I learned how to make VR filters with my 3D modeling files
Various digital renderings of imagined design pieces and environments.
Digital Art
Current Work
You Don't Have to Wait For The World to End
is a project where basic survival skills are spread through graphic tees that won't disappear during the apocalypse (just in case the internet does). The collection consists of tees with information on how to make a fire, filter water, grow your own food, and first aid, in case SHTF.
The internet has become commonplace in our lives, we depend on it for everything. But do we know how to do anything without it? Most of us wouldn’t have predicted a pandemic, so how can we be sure that the internet is forever? There are many ways the internet could fail, including damaged infrastructure, hacker groups or state-sponsored cyber attacks, and climate causes, like solar flare superstorms.
The content featured has been gathered from multiple sources, including conversations with experts, the internet, and books like “Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos”, a DIY resource guide published in Cuba during the Special Period. Illustrations done by the artist and instructional text make up the front
and back of the tees, presenting information as clear and detailed as possible.
This project is ongoing and was also part of the above group show with Serving The People. The t-shirts are available for sale on my website, with 15% of profits being donated to various organizations that deal with climate change and other environmental disasters.
T-Shirts
Neural Network Collection
( In Process)
This projects consists of designing a collection of furniture through the use of Artificial Intelligence.
By training a GAN (generative adversarial network) with a data set containing thousands of images of an object, these networks learn how to recognize that said object, and then create its own images based on what it learned.
This representation is expressed as a latent space, which is the space of possibility of that learned object.
The first iteration i've started working on is a chair. The video shows a very early low-res walkthrough of the latent space (space where all the possibilities exist) of what a trained network thinks a chair can be.
This training can be equated to the process of an artist when creating an artwork.
Once it has more training time, the results will be more defined and recognizable as chair, table, couch, etc.
The smaller images are a sample of the data set given to the generative adversarial network, which includes my own designs, as well as other recognizable and generic designs.
A.I
Temperature Sensing Furniture at the Cyborg Foundation
Furniture to be developed during a two-week residency in Barcelona, Spain (TBD-Covid) at the Cyborg Bunker, a space for research, development, and promotion of projects related to the creation of new senses and perceptions by applying technology to the human body.
I will be working with thermochromic pigments, that change color in response to heat, as a visual representation or sense signifier. By attributing a sense to an inanimate object, I am creating cyborg furniture that will react to its environment through the use of technology.
Pictured .gif shows a precursor to this project where I made UV-sensitive earrings that change color when exposed to sunlight or UV light.
Tech
Future Work
Emerging Structures
How do we design for the future?
What does housing look like when climate change dislocates millions of people?
What is a house that can be built in a few days?
What does a low maintenance home look like?
I've been doing ongoing research on structures for a changing environment. I'm looking at things such as materials, degrees of diy-ness or ready-made-ness, sustainability (as in self-sufficiency), health and wellness, modularity, etc., as well as unregulated built communities ( favelas and shantytowns).
This is not the same as emergency housing, which is temporary, rather it is aimed towards imagining long term solutions that are livable and pleasant, but not cumbersome like most traditional housing.
This research is for a long-haul project with the final aim of building a few of these structures in the coming years.
Speculative
Creative Direction for holistic food-based investigative, collaborative practice where one teaches what they don't know. Special attention to color, form, and textures with a strong emphasis on experimentation. Also important are respect for multicultural culinary practices, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture.
In collaboration with SALADO, an experimental group of vegan chefs based in Buenos Aires