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THE THINKLAB ART PORTFOLIO
Julio Soto -The ThinkLab's creative- is an artist and filmmaker who works and lives in between Madrid and New York. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums around the world including the Instituto Cervantes in NY (curated by the Reina Sofia Museum), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art in New York, Kassel Documenta Film and Video Festival (2003), NAP Video Biennial in Pasadena (2003), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His work emphasizes the idea of futile utopias. Whether scientific, architectural or simply ideological, utopia is a recurrent concept throughout history, almost an intrinsic necessity. Soto's work investigates historical examples of this topic, merging them with fictional scenes extracted from his imagination. In one of his earlier works, 'Invisible Cities', the emphasis was on the mental landscape, poetry and memory, connecting it with the idea of a deserted modern city as a metaphor of futility of human inventions. It was a mesmerizing vision of what appears to be a bleak apocalyptic future where cities have died and been abandoned. It was created with a mixture of 16mm film, still photographs and computer generated imagery. Soto's 'The Possibility of Utopia' (2004-2005), one of his recent digital projects was created for a New York art show. This eighteen-minute audiovisual work dynamically combines found images of once ideal cities such as Akademgorodok, an artificial city designed by Soviet scientists in the 1950s and Pitesti, an urban center known for auto industries in Romania. Soto questions the ideal cities of the later half of the twentieth century and at the same time envisions the future of New Jersey by examining the desire-driven cities of the past. The fantastical quality of his work is derived not only from his archeological research of history but also from his recreation of the discovered images through computer technology. His video-art and installations have received international recognition and awards at the 2005 Toronto Latin Film Festival, the 2005 Rio de Janeiro VideoArt Festival, the 2002 Brooklyn International Film Festival, the NAP Video Biennial in Pasadena and the 2003 Media Arts Festival Japan. His work has been shown extensively at film festivals such as IDFA, Clermont-Ferrand, New York Underground Film Festival, Viper Basel, Impakt, Oberhausen, Hamburg, Nemo and Kasseler to name a few.
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