Pablo de SOTO

Profile

Born in 1977. Graduated from Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm (Sweden) in 2007.
Recent activities are
vjing at LEV festival Gijon (Spain), 2010; Mapping the commons, Athens (workshop and exhibition),  National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Greece), 2010; Metropolitan Video-cartography workshop, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin (Colombia), 2011; Networked Hacklab, Por uma cartografía crítica da Amazônía, Pará (Brasil), 2011; Laboratory of Insurgent Cartographies, IP, Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), 2011.
Selected for PhD at the School of Communication - UFRJ (Brasil) - research project about "The techne of new global movement".
Co-author of "Critical Cartography of the Strait of Gibraltar" (2004), exhibited and published worldwide.
Editor of two books: "Fadaiat: freedom of movement, freedom of knowledge" (2006), and "Situation Room: designing a prototype of a citizen Situation Room" (2010).
Director of Emergent Geographies for the second edition of Technology, creativity and Society in Extremadura (2007).
LAB_Cyberspaces (2007) and LAB_JovenExperimenta (2008) Awards by LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre.
Artist in residency at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo (2008-09).
Participation in Banquete Nodes and Networks Exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe (2008) and Youniverse exhibition curated by Peter Weibel for the Seville International Biennale of Contemporary Art with the physical-digital installation Water4Bits: a second life for Europe's pavillion (2008).
Prototype "Wikiplaza" at Place de la Bastille for "Futur en Seine" Festival on digital contents and the city of the future, Paris (2009).
Co-director of Gaza Cartography workshop (2009) at the Architecture School of Alicante.
Documentary road movie "From Cairo to Gaza" presented at Gijón International Film Festival (2010).

About works / performance

I am part of the generation that has lived and experienced around the creative explosion after the invention of the world wide web, and all the dreams and utopias that the net generated.  My background in architecture has allowed me to look at the digital culture and contemporary art from a different perspective, with reference to science fiction, the situationists, the hacker ethic and the zapatista movement. I was co-founder of hackitectura.net, a group of architects and programmers developing projects and theoretical research in the intersecting field of space, electronic flows and social networks. My research activity concerns about the relationship between territory and technology, mapping the different borders and its means of control, and exploring the insurgencies rising up at this first stage of the 21st Century.

Critical Cartography of the Strait of Gibraltar 
2004, cartography

Valdecaballeros Abandoned Nuclear Power Plant, Siberia Extremeña,
2007

Emergent Geographies Medialab media-architecture
2007, temporary medialab

Pablo at Emergent Geographies Medialab
2007, temporary medialab

Situation Room, a prototype of a citizen Situation Room 
2008, installation and book

Metropolitan Videocartography Workshop,
2011, workshop and videos