BIO

My biggest relationship with art and self expression came with skateboarding at 15, I jump into that void fearless, I was fascinated with this lifestyle and all the art around it, how everyone were doing what they love and living from it, watching guys skating for brands like Santa Cruz, Toy Machine, Real, Chocolate, Zero, all the art in the magazines, Thrasher, Big Brother, Slap, the skate videos, Jump Of a Building, Thrill of It All, Yeah Right! there are so many! It was all I had in my head day and night. Skate culture, the attitude, the art, all became like vitamins, nothing else mattered. But, living from skateboarding art seemed too far away, like an alternate reality, impossible to actually make a living like that in my Guatemalan simulation.

Still, skateboarding has influenced everything I’ve done since then, skate, fall, get up, try again, skate, fall, get up, try again, repeat, 24/7, again, land it. This attitude stick with me, try, try harder, try smarter until it is done, keep learning, don’t wait, don’t hesitate, land that trick, land that project, make that code work, iterate, iterate, iterate, repeat, draw, erase, practice, repeat, don’t stop, keep trying until is done.... keep trying.

This doesn’t mean everything has worked, of course it hasn’t!, but as with everything in life, it’s just one side, success is the other one, both need to coexist, always, it’s just how nature works, the balance, the yin and the yang, the duality of energies in the universe is real. We need to polarize.

Circa 1998, Flash and ActionScript sparked my first love affair with interactive experiences. It was fascinating how these tools allowed me to animate things and make fancy clickable buttons, shapes and characters, then pair this with “The Internet” and holy shit, now I was able to ‘surf the web’ with a shitty dial up connection, learn chunks of actionScript and make a stickman jump and kickflip some stairs! LFG!

Each .swf was some kind of epiphany for me, that was it, that was the thing I wanted to do all my life. I just needed to figure out how anyone would pay me for that… easier said than done.

With almost 18 years on my back, I left my parents house and went into the ‘big city’ to study Graphic Design. I wasn’t the best, but everything felt natural to me, that feeling of creating things, the aesthetic of everything surrounding design, color theory, grid systems, typography, etc. I learned about the fundamentals behind all these crazy layouts I saw in magazines; now I could merge them and make interactive experiences with Flash and the web, so fucking cool!

The best upgrade to my matrix stats.

To my surprise, and luck, I guess, our final project was to be built on Flash! I made like 40+ iterations on ideas and layouts and settled for a design of a test underground site, where the user was the one experimenting with my head; there were monitors and cables where the user would click and see animations that presented my work. Years later, a friend told me it ended up being one of the projects the University used, for many years, as a way to teach students about crafting UX&UI for their final projects. It was nice to know they appreciated my work that much.

In 2006 I graduated and started working in the advertising industry as a creative designer, first at Lowe & Partners and then at BBDO, then as a freelancer for agencies like Leo Burnett and DDB, by that time I was crafting website experiences with Flash & ActionScript, html and css, it was also the time where I started to find web experiments in generative art, and I knew I wanted to do something in that field, merge everything together, but I had this mental barrier that no one was gonna pay for this kind of art, how?, where? and you know… bills won't stop… so ‘someday’ I thought, someday.

A couple of years passed freelancing, and then I partnered with a friend, started a small video production studio (which failed in about a year haha, never switch careers too fast kids), then partnered again with another friend and founded Sinapsis, a design and dev studio for digital products. In those years I had the opportunity to work with top International Brands like Pepsi, Brahva, Movistar, Renault, Merck, USAid, Volkswagen, Santillana, .FOX and several local Guatemalan brands. We were building apps that integrated social media, mini social games for ad campaigns that won international awards, generating images within apps with facebook and Twitter user profile integration, it was a thrill, we were all learning everything as we went from project to project, nonstop, interactive desktop app animations for schools, web apps for regional sales teams, animated gifs for massive local events and concerts like Santana or Cirque du Soleil, automating data visualization services for national weather services, some really cool times, ngl.

Some of my best memories were built in those years.

But then, around 2014, everything started to feel too repetitive, a year passed and everything lost sense for me. After a lot of meditation I realized it wasn’t the projects or the clients, or the market, it was me, I’ve had enough, it was clear that nothing was working for me anymore and I wasn’t finding pleasure in anything, all was dull and grey, I felt trapped, depressed, anxious... not gonna bore you with details, but sometimes my frens, life's difficulty level gets really, really hard...

So in an effort to escape all this, I returned to art, which at this point I had stopped doing for almost 10 years, repurposed my Instagram profile and started uploading almost everything I did, no matter how ‘bad’ I thought it looked. I set myself a simple goal: Get better at drawing, and document this process with each post.

And I did, I’ve been doing it since 2015.

Since then, it has become my place of joy, the place where I can be my weird self, a place where a small tribe has gathered around my art, and a place where I treasure everyone that’s been joining the ride. If you are one, you'll be rewarded.

While all of this was happening, ideas about art projects kept pouring into my head like some kind of frequency I could tune to, and it hasn’t stopped. I’m sure it is a common thing among creatives, you see anything, a jpeg, a vid, you hear a word, you sense a texture and suddenly ideas appear in your head like gifts from the future, maybe I’m accessing the collective unconscious, maybe they are visions of possible outcomes, don't know, but I’m sure they can be manifested... easier said than done.

How to focus the ideas I like the most, on a single sustainable roadmap... all felt like scattered pieces of a puzzle without borders.

This fucking pandemic, clients signed-out, business almost died, I had to move and work remotely with what was/is left of my team, on what projects stayed, which are cool, but few.

I lost my mind, really, I was scared and running everywhere at the same time in my head... but once I pulled myself together, I realized I had more time to focus and clear my head.

Then, with my mind calmed and a new normal in place, all this dull and gray simulation changed.

It hit me this past June on a random day and time, a framework where all these ideas can grow with time, sustainable, scalable, fun, and I can merge art, design, coding and anything I want, all into one... it's so obvious now... Gaming!

It is so obvious and perfect. Gaming is the last big relationship with art I’ve had since being a kid, from ditching a day in school for the arcades on the streets to getting my first console and then leaving earth and into space with StarFox, Zelda for a trip in time, Kratos for greek mythology, the Uncharteds, the Battlefields, co-ops and open worlds with killer graphics! Gaming has been an important part of my life and is one of the sacred places to go, best of life has always been about jumping between drawing, gaming, designing, coding, skating and frends, life can get so fucking perfect at times.

I’m making a video game incorporating blockchain tech. All these efforts I’ve done through the years make sense now, and a lot of my ideas are falling into place, this is happening and I can’t be more grateful for everything that led me to this. Gaming is the space where we can join and enjoy everything! art, design, code, friends, family and significant other, and NFTs gives us the means to craft a fair experience that can scale decentralised, be accessible and rewarding for everyone (almost everyone, we can help the ones that do not have access to tech, but we’ll talk about this in another log).

This is my only purpose now (well, almost, 9 to 5ish and debt are still there, ngl), all I need now is time to build.

Thanks for being you, and thanks for being here, LFG!