I was born in Zaragoza, Spain, May 1974. I am the first son from a pretty normal worker family. I grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins. More or less everyone lived, and lives, at the very same spot. Dad used to work for a company that had him away 5 days/week, so mum had to rely on the family to take care of me and my brother when she had to go to work. We never had a real struggle, or it was hidden to us until much later. Life was a routine of school, sports, family, summer vacation, school, sports … until I became 14. By that age I got my first ID card, where you could see a generous mustache underneath my nose. The type that makes everybody smile, but the one carrying it. I guess I learned early how to deal with being ashamed and started not to care about the things the others seemed to care. It was about that time I got my first pair of jeans as well and decided my parents were not needed at my school meetings. I would act as my own representative while at teacher meetings, etc. It was fun to see the adults faces when me and my facial hair came into play.
I kept that independent spirit over the years and when I made to the engineering school I was known for doing what I felt was right. Not that it was necessarily right, but if something in me told me it was the thing to do, I wouldn't hesitate. Luckily enough the laws of math were on my side and I did right more than wrong, what kept me sane. Very soon I understood engineering wasn't really what I wanted to do. But I was gifted, I could solve all those complex problems and algorithms, I could figure out ways of getting the essence of the problem fairly quick. A friend of mine left the education and moved to Barcelona to study fine arts, nothing I could afford. Therefore I made the plan of finishing my technical studies first and go into arts later.
Ten years later, by 2002, I had managed to finish my studies, worked for a couple of years at different places, and got hired as Assistant Professor at a university in Sweden. Being an academic leaves a lot of time for thinking, creating, reflecting … so I started Aeswad, an art group, together with other 3 people. We had no intention of being paid for anything we did, we just wanted to travel the world, see things, and get into exhibitions. So we did, we were at Istanbul Biennale in 2003 and Berlin Bienale in 2004. By then our collective was already having 8 people and we had the plan to expand … but we started making some money and the ego-problems showed up. We lost it and had to abandon working together.
Our work was mainly conceptual, it was all about doing things leaving no traces. We became part of the new situationist scene emerging all over the art world. It was fun … but it was over and I was somehow fed up with it. I decided to make something closer to my own skills and went into making research about the physical aspects of human interaction. I started to work with electronics and software. I teamed up with a bunch of people and we created a platform –Arduino is it's name– to allow designers, artists, people in general, to learn about technology. That was in March 2005. As for today we have more than 250.000 of those platforms out there. They are part of educational systems, they are into prototypes, forming part of interactive art pieces. We did it for fun, and never expected it to go this far.
I am still not sure what I will do tomorrow, but I have an agenda that I plan with 6 months time. I have no clue if I will meet someone, go to the cinema, read a book, play with my daughter or just try to write a line for my doctoral thesis. On the other hand, I know that in the following months I will go to talk about my work to Spain, the US, Mexico, Turkey, and probably China. I am writing from India … I am just doing what I feel is right and I still wear blue jeans.
14.04.2011, Bangalore, India
I kept that independent spirit over the years and when I made to the engineering school I was known for doing what I felt was right. Not that it was necessarily right, but if something in me told me it was the thing to do, I wouldn't hesitate. Luckily enough the laws of math were on my side and I did right more than wrong, what kept me sane. Very soon I understood engineering wasn't really what I wanted to do. But I was gifted, I could solve all those complex problems and algorithms, I could figure out ways of getting the essence of the problem fairly quick. A friend of mine left the education and moved to Barcelona to study fine arts, nothing I could afford. Therefore I made the plan of finishing my technical studies first and go into arts later.
Ten years later, by 2002, I had managed to finish my studies, worked for a couple of years at different places, and got hired as Assistant Professor at a university in Sweden. Being an academic leaves a lot of time for thinking, creating, reflecting … so I started Aeswad, an art group, together with other 3 people. We had no intention of being paid for anything we did, we just wanted to travel the world, see things, and get into exhibitions. So we did, we were at Istanbul Biennale in 2003 and Berlin Bienale in 2004. By then our collective was already having 8 people and we had the plan to expand … but we started making some money and the ego-problems showed up. We lost it and had to abandon working together.
Our work was mainly conceptual, it was all about doing things leaving no traces. We became part of the new situationist scene emerging all over the art world. It was fun … but it was over and I was somehow fed up with it. I decided to make something closer to my own skills and went into making research about the physical aspects of human interaction. I started to work with electronics and software. I teamed up with a bunch of people and we created a platform –Arduino is it's name– to allow designers, artists, people in general, to learn about technology. That was in March 2005. As for today we have more than 250.000 of those platforms out there. They are part of educational systems, they are into prototypes, forming part of interactive art pieces. We did it for fun, and never expected it to go this far.
I am still not sure what I will do tomorrow, but I have an agenda that I plan with 6 months time. I have no clue if I will meet someone, go to the cinema, read a book, play with my daughter or just try to write a line for my doctoral thesis. On the other hand, I know that in the following months I will go to talk about my work to Spain, the US, Mexico, Turkey, and probably China. I am writing from India … I am just doing what I feel is right and I still wear blue jeans.
14.04.2011, Bangalore, India
