Patricio Gonzalez Vivo (Argentine, b. 1982) is an artist and engineer who uses code, light, and custom-built drawing machines to turn data about landscapes, ecosystems, and the night sky into physical and digital works.,Trained as a clinical psychologist before turning to art, he later co-authored The Book of Shaders with Jen Lowe, an open online guide to fragment shader programming used by digital artists worldwide.,
Gonzalez Vivo trained as a clinical psychologist and expressive arts therapist in Buenos Aires,and practiced therapy until 2012, when he turned fully to art.Efecto Mariposa, 2011, an interactive installation built on volcanic ash from the Puyehue eruption that let visitors reshape a simulated landscape and watch life return to what they had disturbed, became his first international exhibition, shown at FILE Festival São Paulo.He worked as a graphical engineer at Mapzen, building open source digital mapping tools including Tangram and glslViewer,and in 2012 moved to New York to pursue an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design, completed in 2014.,His Parsons thesis, Skylines, 2014, introduced the custom plotters, or drawing machines, that continue to anchor his practice.He has taught at Parsons, ITP New York University, and the School for Poetic Computation,,and has served as Principal Graphic Engineer at Runway, helping build creativity tools.
The Book of Shaders, published with Jen Lowe in 2015 and translated into twelve languages, is an online guide to fragment shader programming used across Processing, openFrameworks and Three.js.,In 2017 he released the Pixel Spirit Deck, a tarot deck built to teach the GLSL shader language that renders light on modern screens.That year he also began Hypatia, an open source library that calculates the real time position of stars, planets and satellites,which underlies a series of real time astronomical works made in collaboration with Lowe.,,Among them are Luna, 2017, a portrait of the moon accurate to the current hour,Estrellas, 2018, which renders the night sky as it appears above the room where it is shown,and Weaver, 2025-2026, which traces the constellations his Irish and Italian ancestors would have seen crossing the Atlantic to Argentina.,Since 2025 he has extended the drawing machine practice into oil painting with Santos, a portrait series naming its subjects for the saint whose feast day coincides with their birthday, in which a plotter lays down a computer vision scaffold that Gonzalez Vivo completes by hand.,
