1. CATÁLOGO DE EXPOSICIÓN:

AFTER THE THIRD CULTURE

Art, Code and the Space In Between

In 1959, C. P. Snow described a division between science and the humanities that would later lead him to propose the possibility of a “third culture” capable of reducing that distance. More than half a century later, perhaps it’s less interesting to try to reconcile these two territories than to ask what happens when an artistic practice no longer sees them as separate.

After the Third Culture brings together five works by Irene Arroyo created between 2024 and 2026. They involve illustration, programming, digital interfaces, sound and interaction, but this exhibition is not about how a manual practice was replaced by a technological one. The change is less obvious: it is about how the artist understands what it means to make an artwork, and how much control its author really needs.

Across these works, some operations remain: line, repetition, accumulation, layering and transformation. What changes is who performs them, how much can be decided in advance and whether an artwork necessarily needs to have a final result.

ALL UNDER CONTROL

What does it mean to be the author of an image?

In Mitología Griega Ilustrada: Relatos de historias y leyendas (2024), the answer seems quite simple. The illustrations are built through ink, line and the accumulation of marks. Density appears gradually, line by line, and every one of these decisions passes directly through the artist’s hand. The image is built, corrected and, eventually, considered finished.

Behind this way of working was a specific idea of what gave value to an artwork. Technical and material mastery was not only a tool for expressing an idea, but part of what seemed to legitimise the work itself. Difficulty, time and control carried enormous weight within a tradition where mastering the material could become a visible demonstration of authorship.

The limitation wasn’t illustration itself, but using one way of making as a measure for all the others. Photography could seem simple because its effort was not visible in the same way. Programming felt even further away: it seemed technically inaccessible and wasn’t even part of Arroyo’s artistic vocabulary yet.

The problem began when she encountered practices that this definition of art did not know where to place. Sol LeWitt’s work was one of them. If an artwork could first exist as an idea or a set of instructions, where did that leave the technical execution that had seemed so important until then? Technical mastery didn’t lose its value, but it began to lose its status as a necessary condition for making art.

LETTING GO, BY DESIGN

What happens to authorship when the artist stops making every decision?

Ventanas de Error (2026) shows this moment of friction. The first experiments still followed the previous logic: bringing one of the artist’s own drawings into a computational environment while keeping the result closed, controlled and predictable. The project started to make sense when this need to decide everything began to disappear.

An error window presents a button that promises a solution: Fix. However, clicking it fixes nothing. Each attempt activates new elements that progressively contaminate the image, while the error window remains. Every action leaves a trace and, after several attempts, the user begins to realise that they are feeding an error rather than solving it.

JODI was an important reference for this relationship with the interface. In their work, what we normally expect to be functional and predictable can become strange or apparently broken. Error stops being only a failure and starts to offer other possibilities as an artistic language.

But the change in Ventanas de Error is not simply about replacing ink with code. The artist no loger draws every element on the screen. Instead, she designs a set of rules and allows interaction, time and the system itself to do part of the work.

This becomes more conscious in After the Portrait: Erosion of the Self (2026). The portrait is no longer treated as a closed image, but as a process of transformation. Each participant introduces an image, the system modifies it and the result becomes part of a growing collective archive.

Here, one expression becomes particularly useful: “designer of conditions”. The artist establishes the rules and limits, while part of the agency is distributed between her, the code and the participants.

Latour helps to think about this change because the system is not simply a neutral intermediary: it also changes what eventually happens. This connects with a recurring influence in Arroyo’s practice, Sougwen Chung, whose robotic drawing systems explore a process in which machine and artist both participate.

Letting go of control, then, doesn’t mean disappearing as an author. It means deciding what to control and what not to control. Authorship moves from executing every element towards designing the conditions that allow something to happen.

WHEN THE PROCESS BECOMES THE WORK

What remains of an artwork when there is no final image?

Geometría Sonora (2026) takes this question further. A mathematical structure based on fractal geometry constantly transforms over time and in response to sound. Forms appear, grow, move and disappear. At lower sound intensity they can become more organic; as it increases, the structure becomes more tense, electric and unstable. Sound doesn’t accompany an already constructed imag, it participates in what the image becomes.

A screenshot would only preserve one of the many possible states of a system whose meaning lies precisely in its continuous traansformation.

Vera Molnar places this work within a broader history of algorithmic creation. Her explorations of geometry, rules, variation, order and disorder show that introducing a system doesn’t mean removing artistic decisions. The rule itself can also become artistic material.

Despite the distance between Geometría Sonora and Mitología Griega Ilustrada, line, repetition, accumulation, density and layering are still there. The operations have not disappeared, what has changed is who (or what) performs them.

Zen-Ith (2026) takes this idea beyond image generation. Under the appearance of a wellness and self-development app, the experience gradually becomes a system of metrics, comparison and pressure that responds to and attempts to condition the user’s behaviour. The designed process no longer produces only forms, but also expectations, decisions and responses. The relationship with the user becomes part of the artwork itself.

This relational dimension connects with Bourriaud, while Joana Moll’s work draws attention to digital system and infrastructures that normally remain invisible. Steyerl’s understanding of the digital image as something affected by circulation, transformation and loss of control also becomes relevant here. Together, these references help explain why the final result is no longer the only place where the artwork can be found.

These five works, therefore, don’t tell a story in which the manual has been replaced by the digital. Mitología Griega Ilustrada doesn’t represent an abandoned practice. Illustration, ink and technical mastery aree still available and still belong to Arroyo’s possibilities. The difference is that now they are a choice, not a boundary.

Perhaps, this is the most important change in the journey. The question is no longer only what can be done with a particular technique, but what an artwork needs and which medium, system or process can make it possible. Sometimes the answer can still be an image built line by line; at other times, it can be a rule, an interaction or a system that continues to change without ever reaching a definitive form.

After the “third culture”, perhaps the space between art and code can simply be a place to work from. The line remains, what has changed is who is allowed to draw it.

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