PCA Talk Presents: Cristina Hoffmann "Left to Our Own Device"
Does reality have a user guide? Have we forgotten that we are the source of our own rules? The devices and conventions that should be at our service, end up shaping us and delimiting our notion of what’s possible. But can we play with our truths and infiltrate poetically our definitions of the world and of ourselves? This talk will touch upon these issues, which lay the foundation of Cristina Hoffmann’s work.
Before focusing on her art practice, Cristina spent 10 years on the tech sector designing digital systems, interfaces and services that allowed new interactions with machines and between people. Questioning her initial career as a designer and her training as an engineer, she is interested in human tools, rules, identities… and how people build their realities.
She approaches these subjects with various materials, instruments and techniques.
Robots, maps, performances, electrical interfaces, drawings, paintings, texts… she considers all these as devices: human fabrications that contribute to shape our beliefs and behaviours. Interrogating these constructs, she seeks to render them malleable, using them as much to structure her knowledge as to challenge it, in a constant pursuit of what is mysterious or constitutes a blind spot.
Cristina holds engineering degrees from the Polytechnic school of Madrid (UPM) and the National School of Advanced Techniques of Paris (ENSTA). She has lived and worked in France, Spain, England, Italy and the U.S.A. and has collaborated with the UK, Japan, Israel and The Netherlands. Spanish born in Mexico, today she lives and works in Paris, and continues to develop her work at both a national and international level.