Animations generated from photographs by Mariano Rodríguez
These animations were created from photographs taken by Mariano Rodríguez during his years as a professional photographer. Using artificial intelligence to give movement to images, Rodriguez turns the visual memory into something akin to a spectral presence. At first might appear to be a purely technical exercise, it becomes, upon closer analysis, a reflection on the essence of artistic creation and the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that support it. Although he has since moved away from photography as a profession, Rodriguez continues to ask himself: do his works reflect the clarity of his original vision or are they illusions born of a mind shaped as much by intuition as by fickle mind? In his opinion, all aesthetic expression emerges from a subtle dialogue between body and mind, a psychic energy that, when properly channeled, crystallizes into tangible emotions: love, desire, fear, tears. Photography, in this sense, becomes a fragile distillation of the intangible. Rejecting the illusion of total control or technical mastery, Rodriguez sees the artist not as a sovereign creator, but as a permeable vessel, subject to forces beyond comprehension or will. Like an unfinished manuscript or a symphony that will never be performed, the artist is always incomplete. Within this context, even neural networks-those algorithmic architectures now capable of simulating thought and emotion-emerge as unsettling reflections of our own condition.
They confront us with a paradox: the more we simulate consciousness, more we recall our own emotional limits. Creativity, by human or machine-generated, develops through structured patterns, almost algorithmic. However, while machines operate with the cold neutrality of coding, human expression is inevitably filtered through the volatility of emotion. This tension - between the cold logic of machine and the trembling urgency of feeling - calls into question not only the authenticity of what we create, but also the very definition of art. Can a work of art exist without emotion? Or is it precisely this emotional interference that gives the work of art its ontological depth? Rodriguez's photographic vision had an unmistakable cinematic quality. He constructed his series as fragmented narratives, each image a scene designed not only to reveal, but also to hide. The creative process becomes an intimate confrontation, in which each result provokes doubt: "I have captured what I imagined, or is this final image nothing more than a diluted echo of that initial vision? Eventually, the act of materializing an idea -by means of a photograph, a film, or a painting- implies a form of loss. After the work leaves the internal world of the artist, they no longer belong entirely to creator, is become the domain of the viewer. What remains is a kind of silence, an emptiness, but also a strange peace. As if a cry has been released, not just a sound, but something much deeper, like the silent relief that follows a cry.
By Elías V. Lartigue