This work presents the Paniri volcano (Atacama Desert) rendered in ASCII mode and printed on fabric, honoring the Atacameño belief that volcanoes or TataMallkus function as bridges between heaven and earth.
The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) method deconstructs the digital image by replacing each pixel with a text character, creating a visual equivalent in grayscale. The specific characters that comprise this composition were determined by the phrase “Ay la hoy’ri peni cachii li cielo,” which translates from Kunza as “So on earth as in heaven.” This biblical phrase, drawn from the Lord’s Prayer, was introduced into Atacameño culture during Catholic colonization.
By constructing the volcano from the words that invoke its spiritual essence, the distinction between representation and materialization collapses. The image is the invocation itself of the mountain’s meaning. In this gesture, each character carries the power to evoke, name, and thus create—echoing ancestral understandings where the word possesses the capacity to shape and animate the world.
Printed in large-scale format on canvas, the volcano is conjured into existence through the very words that define its spiritual function, a bridge between the realms of heaven and earth. Digital code, then, is the information of a potential existence that waits patiently to be evoked and projected before us.
2022
ASCII image, sublimation print on Deko Texx
475 x 320 cm.
View of the exhibition “Sky is falling asleep on the desk of the time”, Galerie Peter Gaugy, Vienna, Austria.
