I have a very vivid memory of my childhood linked to the experience of the fireworks displays that took place on the grand avenue of my city. I remember that suspension of breath, the mouth slightly open, the vibration in my chest even before the sound reached my ears and that dazzling light that created ephemeral constellations in the night.
The American art critic Rosalind Krauss said that contemporary art often seeks to displace our senses to force us to inhabit the present. For years, my visits to art centers were influenced by a whole host of knowledge that conditioned my impressions and parked my experientiality. But there came a time when this critical armor collapsed under the weight of the overwhelming emotion I experienced.
I have realized that something similar happens to us when technology stops being a cold calculation tool and suddenly becomes a spectacle of pure visual magic. And that is exactly what I see happening every time a new New Media Art project appears on the scene in Barcelona.
The city, which for decades has fed its international imaginary with Gaudí's architecture, Miró's organic stroke or the Mediterranean light captured on canvas, is experiencing a silent but irresistible metamorphosis. Today, Barcelona's new artistic pieces are programmed in lines of code, fed with millions of real-time data and projected onto architectures that seem to come back to life.
That is why we can say that our metropolis has become not only a stage where these works are exhibited, but also the laboratory where they are conceived, calculated and exported to the rest of the planet. And at the epicenter of this revolution there is a secular cathedral that does not usually appear in conventional tourist itineraries, but that sustains the pulse of this new stage: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS).
Under a glass urn, the MareNostrum 5 is housed in an old desacralized chapel (the Torre Girona chapel) - the perfect contrast between the memory of stone and the dizzying speed of bits. The MareNostrum 5 is one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe and the world, and it is not only designed to predict climate change, design drugs or simulate particle physics; it is also an invisible engine of 21st century culture.
At the intersection between supercomputing and plastic creation, the BSC has consolidated itself as a pioneering hub on a continental scale. Far from being a sporadic experiment, this fruitful dialogue has been formalized with the launch of the Creative Intelligence Lab, the first European art and science laboratory integrated into a supercomputing center. As Fernando Cucchietti, the laboratory's director, explains to me, this unit was born after almost fourteen years of articulating scientific and artistic research.
Through three axes—residencies, public experiments, and cultural programs—the center places the power of MareNostrum 5 at the disposal of imagination to demonstrate that artificial intelligence and big data are not cold entities, but amplifiers of aesthetic experience. "There is no other supercomputing center in Europe that has a program as developed as ours; we are leading the initiative to transfer this way of working," says Cucchietti. A clear example of this intersection of paths is the recent launch of the INTERIOR residency, a project specifically conceived to investigate and unravel, from the plastic language, what it essentially means to inhabit and think a supercomputer.
When we observe a visualization of climate data or a fluid simulation generated by high-performance computing, we not only contemplate scientific rigor, we also witness a new aesthetic. When digital art began to become popular in the mid-1980s, little was known about how code would eventually become a brush capable of calculating how light moves in the air or how a sea current flows with a mathematical precision that borders on poetry.
Barcelona has understood that having a supercomputer in the heart of the city also means having a factory of new visual imaginaries.
If the BSC is the machine that processes knowledge, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) is the space that translates it, dissects it, and delivers it to us so that we learn to formulate uncomfortable questions. Few artistic centers in Europe have had the lucidity of the CCCB in addressing the cultural impact of artificial intelligence and the algorithmization of existence.
Entering an exhibition on digital culture at the CCCB requires shedding the classic role of passive spectator. Here, one does not come to look at paintings at a prudent safety distance; one comes to interact, to be scanned, to see how our reflection or our movements feed an algorithm in real time. It is in this friction that the center demonstrates its capacity, when it manages to make the public understand the ethical background of the digital world while experiencing the aesthetic surprise of the work.
The usual Barcelona visitor, traditionally demanding of its cultural institutions, has responded to this paradigm shift with an overflowing curiosity that has encouraged new spectators normally distant from certain artistic or cultural environments.
There is something deeply democratizing about digital arts when they are shrewdly curated. They break the invisible barriers that often keep new generations away from traditional museums. An interactive screen or an enveloping light installation does not require a prior manual of art theory to make an impact; they appeal directly to perception, to the sense of space and, again, to that childlike wonder before light and sound.
But all this scientific and institutional infrastructure would be useless without the fundamental raw material: the creators. Barcelona has become home to a handful of independent New Media Art studios that are true contemporary alchemists. Firms based in neighborhoods like Poblenou or Eixample are now sought after from Tokyo, New York, Dubai, or Paris to transform monumental facades and museum spaces into memorable immersive experiences.
Studios like Onionlab, Tigrelab, or Sixmedia embody this new breed of artists. In their workshops, there is no smell of turpentine or easels; there are ultra-high-resolution screens, graphics processors at the limit of their capacity, and multidisciplinary teams where programmers, 3D designers, architects, and spatial sound composers coexist.
But what is truly fascinating about this fabric of studios is their ability to maintain the local production seal. They create from Barcelona because the city offers them a unique creative density, also related to other internationally renowned festivals such as MIRA Digital Arts Festival or Sónar+D; the ease of forging alliances with research centers and, above all, a quality of life that attracts the best international talent in interaction design and computer graphics.
This effervescence is not an isolated perception; it responds to a consolidation that places the Catalan capital at the international forefront. As Marc Gomariz, co-director of the MIRA festival, points out, the city is today "a world leader in talent, events, training and exhibition centers, and public and private resources; it is on the same level as Berlin, NYC, Paris, London and Amsterdam". In his opinion, the vigor of emerging creators shows that we are living "a historic moment that will not stop evolving".
However, amidst this technological vertigo, a critical stance also emerges that calls for recovering texture and the tangible in the face of the hegemony of the screen. Gomariz himself does not hide his rejection of the drift of new generative algorithms: "AI by a landslide, for better or for worse, but that is 100% subjective. I hate it with all my soul. I much prefer to see, touch, feel, hear and interact with carefully crafted and subtle sound and sculptural projects than extended and virtual realities. All this is getting a bit tiring". A provocative reflection that reminds us that true fascination does not lie in the accumulation of computing power, but in the delicacy with which a work manages to move the viewer's skin.
This ecosystem would not function as a closed circuit without the presence of community catalysts. Events like the MIRA Digital Arts Festival act as the great meeting point where the programmer of an independent studio crosses paths with the BSC researcher, the CCCB curator and the young public. In these events, it is confirmed that digital art has surpassed the attraction of a fair to become a full-fledged language. Emerging technologies —from generative AI to holophonic sound or extended reality— are not empty artifices, but the instruments with which our era records its doubts, its fears and its beauties.
Our city has found in these series of zeros and ones its new great cultural language. It has not needed to renounce its history or its traditional architecture to embrace it; on the contrary, it has put its supercomputing, its cultural centers, and its studios at the service of a new beauty. A beauty that is not displayed in a showcase or hung on a wall, but rather lights up, envelops us, and, for a few moments, leaves us surprised and breathless again.