Marcelo Funes-Gallanzi

Marcelo expresses his artistic abilities through his algorithmic alter ego: Raquel-IA! She is a virtual assistant he has been developing for more than 20 years who can take in text such as poems, quotes, book extracts, song lyrics and the like and produce artworks. She looks at each sentence the user tenders and links it to an artwork for inspirational purposes. Once the user asks for an artwork to be generated, she combines all the inspirational artworks according to her compositional skills and paints the final piece using her own contemporary color palette.

Raquel-IA uses a unique genera cognition engine that processes natural language both from the visitor and in order for her to learn and evolve. No neural nets of any kind, ontologies, machine learning or training of any kind is employed. Her knowledge base includes paintings, photographs and pictures of sculptures, each having an ekphrastic description attached so Raquel-IA is able to pick the artworks that are semantically closest to each sentence and bind an artwork to each sentence.

Much work remains to be done but I hope visitors like some of the artworks on offer in this collection. So far, Raquel-IA's work has found collectors from Germany, Portugal, Holland, Fran...

Marcelo went to school in London before going to university at Warwick, where he read engineering and completed his PhD in optical engineering in 1995. In 1996 he moved to Mexico where he did research for a few years and then set up his own engineering company, in which he has been developing Raquel-IA in his spare time for the last 20 years.

2022:
Temporary Exhibition Raquel-IA, Exphrastic Art: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, 24th March to the 22nd of May 2022, Edificio Central, Universidad Panamericana, Campus Guadalajara, Guadalajara, México. https://en.arteyculturaupgdl.com/expo-raquelia

2021
Anton Knight Fine Art Gallery, Quebec, Quebec, Canada, 14th August 2021.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSnfx4-rfOO/