Karlos Gil

Works

[memory]
[future]
[forward]

[imagination]
[past]
[backward]

[conditions]
[present]
[life]

15–06–2025 [027]
AFTERLIFE is a generative audiovisual installation that offers a technological meditation on memory and the perception of the landscape. Landscapes filmed in different locations around the world are handed over to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t simply reproduce them, but dreams, reorganizes, and reinvents them endlessly. The landscape thus becomes a suspended organism, sensitive to the presence of the viewer, breathing, mutating, and forgetting, like a memory that cannot be fully fixed. As in Romanticism, the landscape here is not simply nature, but a mirror of human interiority: immeasurable, elusive, profoundly unstable. However, where the Romantic traveler found the abyss of his solitude, the viewer of AFTERLIFE finds a living system: a technological memory that tirelessly rewrites its own past.

25–11–2022 [026]
The film Origin was shot in the vast, dark passages under Madrid. Images of the hollow underground are combined with haunting deep listening music in order to interrogate the nature of time and how cinema can shape our conception of past, present and future realities. The film conjures up ghosts of Mesopotamian warriors while predicting human disasters and futuristic alien behavior. Things of ever deeper antiquity seem to wake up and begin their comeback lurking in a smooth subterranean labyrinth

07–10–2019 (025)
Uncanny Valley is a dystopian sci-fi film that deals with the relationship between machines and humans based on the encounter between an android and its doppelgänger, reflecting on the duality of animism and technology. It explores complex existential problems due to the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis in the field of robotics, in which an android created too much in the image and likeness of a human faces rejection.

13–01–2022 [024]
I transform the reading of these foams —normally thrown in the recycling bin—, by casting them with noble metals used in the past for making durable stuff like silver, gold or copper. These metals have different patinas in order to change their colors over time and nearly every piece is scored with deep, straight, alien lines. In this physical translation, images are generated in the negatives, the cavities and the interstices, and look more like relics —something that remains, what's left over— standing like alien devices, weirdly sensual and creaturely.

25–05–2022 [023]
The sculptural installation TERMINAL emerges as a material and conceptual counterpoint. An abandoned modular walkway is recontextualized within the gallery space as a poetic landscape, evoking the desolate beauty of the lava fields near Námaskarð in Iceland. These types of structures—typically used to protect both visitors and fragile terrain in geothermally active zones—are here presented as relics of a suspended function, stripped of utility and reimagined as vestiges of an unrealized infrastructure. TERMINAL thus unfolds as a romantic landscape in ruins, conjuring visions of abandoned futures and speculative worlds. It invites not only fantasy, but also a contemplative drift through layers of time—technological, geological, and psychological.

17–11–2022 (022)
The ongoing project Stay Gold has been made on Jacquard-type looms, the first system to automate tapestry weaving using punch cards; a direct ancestor of the computer and of current manufacturing facilities. All the sequences shown in the tapestries represent imaginary machines, hybrid fluids, haunted landscapes and magical species while conjuring up a retro–futuristic presence. This flow between different narratives weaves a web of formal contingencies between different historical moments that turn out to be closer than might be expected. The result is an image of fragmented time, a sort of network of connections between different archaeologies.

17–01–2022 (021)
The main idea of Timefall is to compose sensorial encounters with the nature of time through a study of how natural and artificial bodies operate, how media affect memory and the relationship between life and death. Despite these commonalities, this work also shows an almost terrifying randomness and a desire to operate at several different points on the very edge of art since the object's ultimate purpose is its own destruction through the transmutation of matter. Each tank is programmed with unique atmospheric conditions to create a different time rhythm. The climatic atmosphere generated in each tank will shape the objects presented on it thus several processes of acceleration and deceleration of the linear time of the exhibition will be generated.

25–11–2022 (020)
The film Origin was shot in the vast, dark passages under Madrid. Images of the hollow underground are combined with haunting deep listening music in order to interrogate the nature of time and how cinema can shape our conception of past, present and future realities. The film conjures up ghosts of Mesopotamian warriors while predicting human disasters and futuristic alien behavior. Things of ever deeper antiquity seem to wake up and begin their comeback lurking in a smooth subterranean labyrinth

15–06–2025 (019)
The main idea of Timefall is to compose sensorial encounters with the nature of time through a study of how natural and artificial bodies operate, how media affect memory and the relationship between life and death. Despite these commonalities, this work also shows an almost terrifying randomness and a desire to operate at several different points on the very edge of art since the object's ultimate purpose is its own destruction through the transmutation of matter. Each tank is programmed with unique atmospheric conditions to create a different time rhythm. The climatic atmosphere generated in each tank will shape the objects presented on it thus several processes of acceleration and deceleration of the linear time of the exhibition will be generated.

30–09–2018 (018)
In Redundancy (de-extinction), Gil updates one of his most iconic series featuring two compositions made with recycled neon bulbs from a traditional Hong Kong street-ad, now replaced with LED technology. The pieces are repurposed in a complex assembly line, which conserves the glass, the gas and the original colour to generate two new compositions that breathe a new life into an endangered technology. Redundancy (de-extinction) is made out of recycled industrial neon signs from Madrid infamous Schweppes sign in Callao Square. The transparent tubes, where traditional neon and argon gas used to create every possible colour, are hung like newly shed snakeskins. It's the first time in this series that Gil brings a raw object to the fore by using a technology that is in danger of extinction such as the neon tube.

10–06–2025 [017]
AFTERLIFE is a generative audiovisual installation that offers a technological meditation on memory and the perception of the landscape. Landscapes filmed in different locations around the world are handed over to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t simply reproduce them, but dreams, reorganizes, and reinvents them endlessly. The landscape thus becomes a suspended organism, sensitive to the presence of the viewer, breathing, mutating, and forgetting, like a memory that cannot be fully fixed. As in Romanticism, the landscape here is not simply nature, but a mirror of human interiority: immeasurable, elusive, profoundly unstable. However, where the Romantic traveler found the abyss of his solitude, the viewer of AFTERLIFE finds a living system: a technological memory that tirelessly rewrites its own past.

21–04–2018 (016)
The light installation “Second Sun” uses imagination and technology to generate a re–imagined landscape inside the gallery. Using references from speculative science–fiction, the installation operates as portal to a parallel new world, creating an alter narrative on our ecological future. Visitors are temporarily blinded by brightly illuminated fog when enter the space, finding a double sunset –or doppelganger sun– in the back that illuminates the whole scenario. For this installation, Gil has created an algorithmic interface that records natural soundscapes and frequencies from the internet, and transmits them to the gallery lively. These sensory data acts as a live score for the installation and creates a sort of in-between area where viewers are immersed in a nonlinear flow of sound events.

21–04–2018 (016)
The light installation “Second Sun” uses imagination and technology to generate a re–imagined landscape inside the gallery. Using references from speculative science–fiction, the installation operates as portal to a parallel new world, creating an alter narrative on our ecological future. Visitors are temporarily blinded by brightly illuminated fog when enter the space, finding a double sunset –or doppelganger sun– in the back that illuminates the whole scenario. For this installation, Gil has created an algorithmic interface that records natural soundscapes and frequencies from the internet, and transmits them to the gallery lively. These sensory data acts as a live score for the installation and creates a sort of in-between area where viewers are immersed in a nonlinear flow of sound events.

21–04–2018 (016)
The light installation “Second Sun” uses imagination and technology to generate a re–imagined landscape inside the gallery. Using references from speculative science–fiction, the installation operates as portal to a parallel new world, creating an alter narrative on our ecological future. Visitors are temporarily blinded by brightly illuminated fog when enter the space, finding a double sunset –or doppelganger sun– in the back that illuminates the whole scenario. For this installation, Gil has created an algorithmic interface that records natural soundscapes and frequencies from the internet, and transmits them to the gallery lively. These sensory data acts as a live score for the installation and creates a sort of in-between area where viewers are immersed in a nonlinear flow of sound events.

Karlos Gil— projects, works, publications

Karlos Gil—
projects, works, publications