Hello. I am Álvaro Castro-Castilla (@alvatar). I am a software engineer and artist. As an engineer, I specialize in distributed systems and blockchain infrastructure. But that is not the purpose of this web page.

As an artist, I work at the intersection of traditional abstract painting and the digital reality. My main approach is through a man-machine dialog: using advanced software tools like Machine Learning, I develop code that learns and projects my work in the physical world onto the digital one, and vice versa. The result of this are combinations of Paintings and Digital Entities made of Neural Networks, Cellular Automata, Self-Modifying Code and Evolutionary Computations.

From 2001 to 2010, digital art & architecture were my primary interests, and so I created my first digital art projects while still a student of Architecture at Escuela Politécnica de Arquitectura de Madrid. This was an era that didn't know about social networks, the iPhone, or many of the creative tools of nowadays.
It was then when I started coding in C/C++/OpenGL. Since my beginnings, I became sensitive to the importance of being close to the metal to work on the creation of purely digital entities. As a consequence, I've pursued always a deep understanding of the mechanisms of software, the algorithms and structures that construct these machines existing in a different plane of reality. During nearly a decade (2010-2019), I stayed away from art, and focused almost exclusively on software engineering and entrepreneurial projects. In 2019, my old passion for art and my profession as software engineer and entrepreneur converged. I felt again the need to continue the journey to shape a language in art combining the engineering and technical knowledge I've acquired over the years, together with my passion for fine arts.

These are the exhibitions I've participated on: