Digital Architecture

Name: Xefirotarch | Hernan Diaz Alonso
Occupation : Architect
Design field: Architecture, Installations and Product design.
Most prominent style : Uncanny designs with an alien-seeming inspired aesthetic from biological mutilation.
Years active : 2001 - present.
Location : Los Angeles, US.

"Xefirotarch’s design obsessions are based in an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and the set to work on architecture. That said perhaps Xefirotarch’s architecture is itself “mutant/genetic,” and perhaps it is, perhaps it is the emergent condition –horrific. Perhaps when the projected figure is frozen in a sufficiently dense, opulent articulation it does achieve a resonant state of topological affect. But if so that achievement is derived as much from the act of designing that figure as it is from the intensity of the extant form. It is produced in the act of design, less through special techniques or processes (though also through these) than in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking. Here that sensation is more like painting than engineering: driven by personal, idiosyncratic gesture more than an application of systematic procedure to material condition. the genesis of this is internally driven but not intuitive. Having watched hours, weeks, months of bad Hitchcockian cinema. Xefirotarch’s micro techniques for combing the thresholds of the horrific-becoming beautiful and the beautiful-becoming horrific/ grotesque have imprinted themselves as visual-temporal cues on his design retina. These codes (cut here, blend there, match on action, shot-reverse-shot, false POV, staccato violins, scripting topologies etc.) are processed, mashed-up, and re-projected back onto the screens pace of animation software. There image-forms are densely layered and then pulled back from themselves, balanced and unbalanced, such that their formal architecture within the frame always competes with the structure of the edit -the latent seam- for the organization of the screen-event. In the course of such moments, Xefirotarch is the director, editor and audience all at once, watching the form materialize and interacting with that emergence. His decisions to speed up and slow down, slice and blend fuse and separate are repetitions of scenic rhythms he has learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect. This is visceral. Like the filmgoer engrossed into the cinematic apparatus of yore (see Bawdry Delouse, Penney) this well-immersed designer sweats and squirms and grunts over what he watches before him. This is an exacting processing behavior, like the subconscious mind during dream state, cycling through the raw data of everyday life’s input, cutting and pasting, iterating toward multiple provisional renders on the mind’s eye. The design settles into the liminal consciousness of productive concentration, into an unfolding practice that is also kind of techniques cinemas / computational; played out on the cameras obscura of his glowing monitors. Any sensibility you read within the final render is an index of a precision of this processing."
- Xefirotarch's Website